He had been taken prisoner by the French near Badajoz while serving in General Hill’s division, but managed shortly afterwards to make his escape between Vittoria and Pampeluna. The following morning he fell in with a party of General Mina’s Guerillas, who, as soon as they found him to be an Englishman, wished him to enlist in their band until he could regain his regiment. This offer he was glad to accept. After giving me a very amusing account of the manners of the Guerillas, their rich picturesque dresses and arms, and their wild military life in the mountains, he proceeded to detail several anecdotes of their cruelty and ferocity, among which I can well remember the following, from the impression it then left upon my mind, and the simple manner in which he related it: Uniting suddenly several of his Guerilla bands in the neighbourhood of Vittoria, Mina, whose information of the movements of the French seemed unerring, one morning surprised and captured a number of waggons filled with stores. They had been sent from Madrid for the army at Vittoria, and were escorted by gendarmes, who were all either killed or taken. The prisoners, about twenty in number, were immediately marched into the mountains, but not before they had time to draw a dark augury of their own fate by seeing all their wounded comrades brutally stabbed to death on the ground where the skirmish had taken place. The prisoners, after having been stripped of nearly every article of wearing apparel, even to their boots, were confined in a space of ground encircled by pens or hurdles, and used for keeping cattle, round which were planted many sentries. In the evening the ferocious mountaineers, elated with their day’s success, being joined by a number of females, their sweethearts and wives made merry with drinking wine and dancing to the music of several guitars. During this merriment both men and women frequently taunted their wretched prisoners, recapitulated the wrongs the Spaniards had suffered at the hands of the French, until they gradually had excited their passions to a partial state of frenzy. In this state, the signal having been given by one of their number, they rushed in among their hapless prisoners, and commenced a general massacre, drowning the cries and supplications for mercy of their victims, as they gave each blow, by enumerating the different losses each had sustained in his family during the war. “Take that for my father you shot,”—“that for my son,”—“this for my brother,” &c., until the work of death was complete. The most inhuman, and perhaps most revolting trait in this general murder was some of the women having actively assisted in the slaughter.