It was about an hour after sunset, and contrary to what is usual at that season and in that country, the night was dark and cloudy. A slight mist rose from the fields surrounding the village, and a fine rain began to fall. In the guard-room adjoining the house in which Luis Herrera was prisoner, the soldiers on duty were assembled round a rickety table, on which a large coarse tallow candle, stuck in a bottle, flared and guttered, and emitted an odour even more powerful than that of the tobacco smoke with which the room was filled. The air was heavy, the heat oppressive, and both the house-door and that of the guard-room, which was at right angles to it, just within the passage, were left open. Whilst some few of the men, their arms crossed upon the table, and their heads laid upon them, dozed away the time till their turn for going on sentry should arrive, the sergeant and the remainder of the guard, including a young recruit who had only two days before deserted from the Christinos and been incorporated in a Carlist battalion, consumed successive measures of wine, to be paid for by those who were least successful in a trial of skill that was going on amongst them. This consisted in drinking _de alto_, as it is called--literally, from a height, and was accomplished by holding a small narrow-necked bottle at arm's length above the head, and allowing the wine to flow in a thin stream into the mouth. In this feat of address the new recruit, whose name was Perrico, was so successful as to excite the envy of his less dexterous rivals. "Pshaw!" said the sergeant, who, in a clumsily executed attempt, had inundated his chin and mustache with the purple liquid--"Pshaw!" said he, on seeing the deserter raise his bottle in the air and allow its contents to trickle steadily and noiselessly down his expanded gullet; "Perrico beats us all." "No wonder," said a soldier, "he is from the country where Grenache and Tinto are more plentiful than water, and where nobody drinks in any other way, or ever puts a glass to his lips. He is a Catalan." "An Arragonese," hastily interrupted Perrico, eager to vindicate himself from belonging to a province which the rough manners and harsh dialect of its inhabitants cause generally to be held in small estimation throughout the rest of Spain. "An Arragonese, from the _siempre heroica_ Sarragossa." "It's all one," said the sergeant, with a horse-laugh, "all of the _corona de Aragon_, as the Catalans say when they are ashamed of their country. But what induced you, Don Perrico, being from Sarragossa, where they are all as revolutionary as Riego, to leave the service of the Neapolitan woman and come over to Charles V.?"