If it be asked why the North had become so far more unquiet than it had been in previous years, the answer must be that the cause was moral and not material. It was not merely that many small places had been evacuated for a time by the French during the Burgos campaign, nor that the British fleet was throwing in arms and supplies at Castro-Urdiales or Santander. The important thing was that for the first time since 1808 the whole people had got a glimpse of hope: the French had been driven out of Madrid; they had evacuated Biscay; Old Castile and Leon had been in the power of Wellington for several months. It was true that Madrid had been recovered, that Wellington had been forced to retreat. But it was well known that the general result of the campaign of 1812 had been to free all Southern Spain, and that the French had been on the verge of ruin in the early autumn. The prestige of the Imperial armies had received at Salamanca a blow from which it never recovered. Wherefore the insurgents of the North put forth during the winter of 1812-13 an energy such as they had never before displayed, and the French generals gradually discovered that they had no longer to do with mere guerrillero bands, half-armed, half-fed wanderers in the hills, recruited only from the desperate and the reckless, but with a whole people in arms. When Caffarelli returned from Burgos, he found that the Spanish authorities had re-established themselves in every town which had been left ungarrisoned, that taxes and requisitions were being levied in a regular fashion, and that new regiments were being formed and trained in Biscay and Guipuzcoa. The nominal Spanish commander in this region was Mendizabal, theoretically Chief of the ‘Seventh Army’--but he was an officer of little resource and no authority. The real fighting man was Longa, originally a guerrillero chief, but now gazetted a colonel in the regular army. He was a gunsmith from the Rioja, a very resolute and persistent man, who had taken to the hills early, and had outlived most of his rivals and colleagues--a clear instance of the ‘survival of the fittest.’ His useful co-operation with Sir Home Popham in the last autumn has been mentioned above: his band, now reorganized as four infantry battalions, was raised from the mountaineers of the province of Santander and the region of the upper Ebro. His usual beat lay between the sea and Burgos, and he was as frequently to be found on the Cantabrian coast as at the defile of Pancorbo, where the great Bayonne _chaussée_ crosses from the watershed of the Ebro to that of the Douro. His force never much exceeded 3,000 men, but they were tough material--great marchers and (as they proved when serving under Wellington) very staunch fighters on their own ground. West of Longa’s hunting grounds were those of Porlier, in the Eastern Asturias: the star of the ‘Marquesito,’ as he was called, had paled somewhat of late, as the reputation of Longa had increased. He had never had