At the words, her sister Maria dropped the mouth of the wine-skin, allowing the red liquor to gush over the floor, and disappeared. The drums beat to fall in and march. But now the soldiers, an instant before so joyous, sank down, one after the other, like poisoned flies, writhing and bemoaning themselves upon the stairs and in the passage. Manuela hung senseless upon my arm. I stooped to lay her gently on the ground, when a musket was fired not three paces behind me. I looked round. It was the Piedmontese, grinning horribly in mingled agony and exultation, as he doubled himself like a worm in the pangs of poison. But the wretch's aim had been too true. Her breast pierced by the bullet, Manuela fell dead beside the other victims. How beautiful she was, even in death, whilst her left breast poured forth in a crimson stream the many sorrows she had sighed under! Poor Manuela! How pale was now your cheek! How different the last farewell kiss on your chill blue lips from that warm and thrilling one in Careta! THE HOSPITAL. The military hospital at Pampeluna was formerly the palace of the bishop, who fled to Don Carlos at the commencement of the war. Its spacious halls and corridors were converted into twelve large wards, four of them for wounded men, and four others for fever patients. Each ward contained about fifty beds, in which, upon dirty mattresses, Christino soldiers pined and suffered. Most of the sick of the foreign legion there gave up the ghost. The nurses were sisters of the Order of Mercy; but these, like nearly all Spaniards pertaining to the church, were adherents of the Pretender, and any thing but zealous in the discharge of their duty towards us. People spoke even of the poisoning of soups and drinks given to the patients--a thing certainly not impossible, all such matters being prepared by the sisterhood, whose proceedings were but carelessly superintended. In each of these wards, during the dead hours of night, a single lamp burned, leaving the two extremities of the room in darkness. The hospital being close to the town wall, there was never a lack of night-birds, attracted to the windows by the smell of corpses. Day and night the sisters moved about the wards, in white veils and black dresses--a mass of keys, beads, and crucifixes, suspended at their side. And frequent were the visits of the episcopal chaplain, Don Rafael Salvador, preceded by bell-ringing urchins, and bearing the last sacrament to some expiring sinner. Repeated bivouacs in inclement weather, and especially that of the 11th March, at the foot of the Dos Hermanas, laid me, on the 15th March 1837, seven months after the incident last related, upon a sick bed in this house of suffering.