The following day, 12th of October, 1810, I rejoined my regiment encamped near a small village on the lines of Torres Vedras, called Aruda, where I found my old Captain, who despite his severe loss, had scraped together a snug company, partly from men who had made their escape from the French after the affair at Almeida, but chiefly from a batch of recruits that joined our first battalion with the third of our regiment that came from England while I was in hospital. Aruda was a pretty little place enough until we mounted our picquets, when the men dreadfully defaced it, perhaps from a belief that the French might enter—a pleasure they never had. The inhabitants whose fears had been enhanced by its exposed situation had nearly all evacuated the place, taking with them only the most portable and valuable of their effects, and leaving the houses, as it were, furnished and tenantless. The change was the more extraordinary from the circumstance of its pleasant site having for many years made it a country resort for the rich citizens of Lisbon. For a few days after our arrival, it presented a picture of most wanton desolation. Furniture of a most splendid description in many instances was laid open to the spoliation of the soldiery. Elegant looking-glasses wrenched from the mantle-pieces were wantonly broken to obtain bits to shave by, and their encasures, with chairs, tables, &c., &c., used as common fire-wood for the picquets; an Israelite would have gloated over the gilded embers, and have deemed perhaps one of them as under the value of what our united fire-places might have been reduced to. These proceedings, however, unravel the secret of spending “half-a-crown out of sixpence a day,” and the philosophical reader will perhaps admit of the plea, that if we had not, the French would have done it for us, an event which we expected, though it fortunately never was realized. Tom Crawley was particularly pre-eminent in this havoc; his enormous strength and length fitting him especially for the pulling down and “breaking up” department.