The whole of that country is full of fleas. The natives may say what they like; but they only damage their credit by denying it, or prove to a charitable mind their own insensibility. The older the deposit or the stratum is, the greater is the number of these active insects; and this old bridge, whether Moorish, or Gothic, or even Roman (as some contended), had an antiquarian stock of them. Therefore poor Hilary, coming to himself--as he was bound to do by-and-by--grew very uneasy, but obtained no relief through the natural solace of scratching. He was strapped so tightly that he could only roll; and if he should be induced to roll a little injudiciously through a gap of the parapet he must go to the bottom of the lashing water. Considering these things, he lay and listened; and though he heard many things which he disliked (and which bore a ruinous meaning to him for the rest of his young life, and all who loved him) he called his high courage to his help; and being unable to talk to himself (from the thickness of the wool between his teeth, which was a most dreadful denial to him), he thought in his inner parts--“Now, if I die, there will be no harm to say of me.” He laid this to his conscience, and in contempt of all insects rolled off to sleep. The uncontrollable outbreak of day, in the land where the sun is paramount, came like a cataract over the mountains, and scattered all darkness with leaps of light. The winding valley and the wooded slope, the white track of water, and the sombre cliffs, all sprang out of their vaporous mantle; and even the bridge of echoes looked a cheerful place to lounge on. “A bad job surely!” said Corporal Nickles, marching with his footsteps counted, as if he were a pedometer. “Bones, us haven’t searched this here ramshackle thing of a Spanish bridge. Wherever young Cap’en can be, the Lord knows. At the bottom of the river, I dessay.” “Better if he never was born,” replied Bones; “or leastwise now to be a dead one. Fifty thousand guineas in a sweep! All cometh of trusting them beggarly Dons. Corporal, what did I say to you?” “Like a horacle, you had foreseen it, sergeant. But we’m all right, howsomever it be. In our favour we has the hallerby.” Hilary, waking, heard all this, and he managed to sputter so through the wool, that the faithful non-commissioned officers ran to look for a wild sheep coughing. “Is it all gone?” he asked pretty calmly, when they had cut him free at last, but he could not stand from stiffness. “Do you mean to say that the whole is gone?” “Captain,” said Bones, with a solemn salute, which Nickles repeated as junior, “every guinea are gone, as clean as a whistle; and the Lord knows where ’em be gone to.” “Yes, your honour, every blessed guinea,” said Nickles, in confirmation. “To my mind it goes against the will of the Lord to have such a damned lot of money.”