parties showed such resolution; they got bickering with the French at the entries of the city, failed to push home, and finally retired with small loss. The gallant and unfortunate La Carrera, charging up and down the streets in vain search for his reinforcements, was finally surrounded by superior numbers, and died fighting gallantly. His enterprise warned Soult that Spanish troops were collecting in front of him, and indeed Villacampa’s infantry was not far off. Wherefore he evacuated Murcia next day, after raising so much of the contribution as he could, and plundering many private houses. The Spaniards reoccupied the place, and Joseph O’Donnell, now placed in command of the Murcian army in succession to Mahy, gave La Carrera’s corpse a splendid funeral. Soult retreated hastily to the Granadan frontier, pillaging Alcantarilla and Lorca by the way. This was the only part taken by the French Army of Andalusia in the January campaign of 1812. The siege of Tarifa had absorbed all its energies. Montbrun’s and Pierre Soult’s enterprises had little effect on the general course of events in eastern Spain. It was Suchet’s own operations which, in the estimation of every observer from the Emperor downwards, were to be considered decisive. When Valencia had fallen, every one on the French side supposed that the war was practically at an end in this region, and that the dispersion of the remnants of Mahy’s and Freire’s troops and the capture of Peniscola, Alicante, and Cartagena,--the three fortresses still in Spanish hands,--were mere matters of detail. No one could have foreseen that the region south of the Xucar was destined to remain permanently in the hands of the patriots, and that Suchet’s occupation of Valencia was to last for no more than eighteen months. Two causes, neither of them depending on Suchet’s own responsibility, were destined to save the kingdom of Murcia and the southern region of Valencia from conquest. The first was Napoleon’s redistribution of his troops in eastern Spain, consequent on the approach of his war with Russia. The second was the sudden victorious onslaught of Wellington on the French in the western parts of the Peninsula. How the former of these causes worked must at once be shown--the effect of the latter cause did not become evident till a little later.