Humble and unobtrusive as such a career must ever be, it was not without its occasional rewards. From General Crawfurd I more than once obtained most kind mention in his despatches, and felt that I was not unknown or unnoticed by Sir Arthur Wellesley himself. At that time these testimonies, slight and passing as they were, contributed to the pride and glory of my existence; and even now--shall I confess it?--when some gray hairs are mingling with the brown, and when my old dragoon swagger is taming down into a kind of half-pay shamble, I feel my heart warm at the recollection of them. Be it so; I care not who smiles at the avowal. I know of little better worth remembering as we grow old than what pleased us while we were young. With the memory of the kind words once spoken come back the still kinder looks of those who spoke them, and better than all, that early feeling of budding manhood, when there was neither fear nor distrust. Alas! these are the things, and not weak eyes and tottering limbs, which form the burden of old age. Oh, if we could only go on believing, go on trusting, go on hoping to the last, who would shed tears for the bygone feats of his youthful days, when the spirit that evoked them lived young and vivid as before? But to my story. While Ciudad Rodrigo still held out against the besieging French,--its battered walls and breached ramparts sadly foretelling the fate inevitably impending,--we were ordered, together with the 16th Light Dragoons, to proceed to Gallegos, to reinforce Crawfurd’s division, then forming a corps of observation upon Massena’s movements. The position he occupied was a most commanding one,--the crown of a long mountain ridge, studded with pine-copse and cork-trees, presenting every facility for light-infantry movements; and here and there gently sloping towards the plain, offering a field for cavalry manoeuvres. Beneath, in the vast plain, were encamped the dark legions of France, their heavy siege-artillery planted against the doomed fortress, while clouds of their cavalry caracoled proudly before us, as if in taunting sarcasm at our inactivity. Every artifice which his natural cunning could suggest, every taunt a Frenchman’s vocabulary contains, had been used by Massena to induce Sir Arthur Wellesley to come to the assistance of the beleagured fortress: but in vain. In vain he relaxed the energy of the siege, and affected carelessness. In vain he asserted that the English were either afraid or else traitors to their allies. The mind of him he thus assailed was neither accessible to menace nor to sarcasm. Patiently abiding his time, he watched the progress of events, and provided for that future which was to crown his country’s arms with success and himself with undying glory.