On arriving at Salamanca our wounded prisoners, some other invalids, and myself were immediately taken into hospital. There we were, French and English, laid up together; and there, I must say, I saw sufficient practice daily in the use of the surgeon’s knife to become perfectly familiar with every form attendant upon amputation. While lying in hospital, at all times a wretched place, from the groans of the numerous sufferers, I was here placed under the immediate attendance of Sergeant Michael Connelly, in charge of our ward, who being sufficiently recovered from a slight wound, was appointed sergeant to the hospital. He was one of the most singular characters I ever met with, and if an awkward person and uncouth face had gained him the preferment, his match certainly could not be found elsewhere. Mike was exceedingly attentive to the sick, and particularly anxious that the British soldier when dying, should hold out a pattern of firmness to the Frenchmen, who lay intermixed with us in the same wards. “Hould your tongue, ye blathering devil,” he would say, in a low tone, “and don’t be after disgracing your country in the teeth of these ere furriners, by dying hard. Ye’ll have the company at your burial, won’t you? Ye’ll have the drums beating and the guns firing over ye, won’t you? Marciful God! what more do you want? ye are not at Elvas, to be thrown into a hole like a dog—ye’ll be buried in a shroud and coffin, won’t you? For God’s sake, die like a man before these ere Frenchers.” Mike, however, had one great failing, he drank like a whale, and did not scruple to adopt as gifts or legacies, the wine rations of both the dying and the dead, until he drank himself out of the world, and as his patients remarked, after all, he died “like a beast.” The news of Mike’s death spread like wildfire, and all his old friends and the convalescents crowded to do honour to his remains.