The day after the action some English troops passed through the town of Alcobaça on their route to join the army; and this circumstance, coupled with our victory, led the inhabitants to suppose they, as well as their property, were perfectly safe; and the idea of removing the one or the other never once occurred to them. Their surprise and confusion was in consequence increased tenfold when they beheld our troops enter the town. Alcobaça was at that time a beautiful rich village, notwithstanding that it supported a magnificent convent and several hundred priests and friars. Those gentlemen, although rigid in their mode of living at times, know as well as any other class of people _how_ to live, and, having ample means of making out life at their disposal, it is not to be wondered at that the convent contained that which was far from unacceptable to us, namely quantities of provisions. On our arrival in the town the inhabitants, terrified at the possibility of being captured by the French, fled, leaving, in many instances, their houses in such haste as not to allow themselves time to take away anything, not even their silver forks and spoons—a luxury which almost the poorest family in Portugal enjoys. These, and other articles, offered a strong temptation to our men to do that which they should not, _i.e._ possess themselves of whatever they found in those uninhabited mansions. Their doing so, to be sure, was a slight breach of discipline; but it was argued by the “friends of the measure,” that Lord Wellington having directed the country parts as well as the towns to be laid waste, in order to distress the enemy as much as possible, the Portuguese were highly culpable in neither taking away their property nor destroying it. It would be almost superfluous to add that an argument of so sound a nature, and delivered in the nick of time, had its due force; it in fact bore down all opposition, and those whose consciences at first felt anything like a _qualm_, in a little time became more at ease, so that by the time the houses had been about half-sacked, there was not one who, so far from thinking it improper to do what he had done, would not have considered himself much to blame had he pursued a different line of conduct.