It was singularly revolting to witness how the pair went to work when handing the bodies from the hospital to the cart; each carried a skin of vinegar, with which they first soused themselves over the neck and face; this done, with one jerk they jilted a single corpse at a time across their shoulders, naked as it was born, and bolted off to the cart, into which it was pitched as if it had been a log of wood. The women, however, who fell victims to the epidemic were generally sewed in a wrapper of calico or some such thing, but they partook of the same hole as the opposite sex, and otherwise were as little privileged. Many were the scores of my poor comrades I thus saw committed to their first parent, and many were the coarse jests the grave-diggers made over their obsequies. While I was confined in hospital, the brigade marched and took up their cantonments between Ciudad Rodrigo and Almeida. In the beginning of February about three hundred convalescents, among whom I was one, were marched, under charge of an officer of the German Legion, to join their respective regiments. Nothing of any consequence, in the march of our party, occurred, with the exception of a very narrow escape I had of being provosted, or in other words flogged. As the anecdote serves to show the light in which the Germans regarded this description of punishment during the war, I will detail it. The men being from different regiments, and under the command of a foreigner, some availed themselves of what they considered a fair opportunity of pilfering from the country people as we pursued our march, and I am sorry to say that drunkenness and robbery were not unfrequent. The German officer, as is usual under such circumstances, experienced great difficulty in keeping the skulkers and disorderly from lingering in the rear. In compliment to my steadiness, he had made me an acting corporal, with strict orders to make the rear men of our detachment keep up. Just before we arrived at the town of Viseu, then occupied by the Foot Guards, and the head-quarters of the Commander-in-chief, I came up to some of our party who were doing their best to empty a pig-skin of wine they had stolen. Being dreadfully fatigued and thirsty, I had not sufficient restraint upon myself to refuse the invitation held out to me to drink, which I did, and so became a partner in the crime. I was in the act of taking the jug of wine from my lips, when a party of the 16th Light Dragoons rode up and made us prisoners; the peasant, from whom the wine had been taken, having made his complaint at head-quarters. We were imprisoned, nine of us in number, in Viseu. The second day, the Hon. Captain Pakenham,[3] of the Adjutant-General’s department, paid us a visit, and told us he had had great difficulty in saving us from being hanged. Although this was probably said to frighten, still it was not altogether a joke, as a man of the name of Maguire of the 27th regiment, who had been with me in