A new source of high value came to my knowledge last year, through the kindness of Mr. G. Scovell, of Hove, who placed in my hands the papers of his grandfather, Major Scovell, who acted in 1811-12-13 as Wellington’s cipher-secretary. Not only was this officer’s personal diary of great use to me, but the file of the intercepted French dispatches in cipher, with the interpretation of them worked out with infinite pains, proved as valuable as it was interesting. Many of the originals, written on small scraps of the thinnest paper, and folded into such minute shapes that they could be sewed on to a button, or hidden in a coatseam, had evidently been taken on the persons of emissaries of the French generals, who had been captured by the guerrilleros, and had probably in most cases cost the bearers their lives. The ciphers were of two sorts: in the more complicated every word was in cipher; in the less complicated only names of persons and places and the numbers of troops or dates were disguised, the bulk of the dispatch being in plain French. In the key to these last there were several hundred arbitrary numbers used, and it was Major Scovell’s task to make out from the context, or the repetition of the same figures in many documents, what the individual numbers meant. By the end of his researches he had identified four-fifths of the names, and those which he had not all belonged to unimportant persons or places, infrequently mentioned. A much shorter but quite interesting file of diary and letters placed at my disposal were those of Cornet Francis Hall of the 14th Light Dragoons. They practically covered only the year 1811, but were very full, and written in an animated descriptive style, very different from that of many dry and short journals. They contained by far the best account of the cavalry part of the fighting at Fuentes de Oñoro that I have ever seen, and I am exceedingly obliged to the writer’s granddaughter Miss E. G. Hall for allowing me to utilize them. I am still occasionally using notes of 1811 made from two collections of unpublished letters, of which I had occasion to speak in my last preface, those of General Le Marchant, now in the hands of Sir Henry Le Marchant of Chobham, and those of General John Wilson belonging to Commander Bertram Chambers R.N. To both of the courteous possessors of these files of correspondence I owe my best thanks.