resistance, losing one of their two guns. ♦THE FRENCH REMOVE THEIR SICK TO MONTERREY.♦ The French had left 200 sick and wounded at Ribadavia; they had removed them to Orense, where nearly 500 were added to the number, and now the whole were ordered to Monterrey, in so insecure a state did Soult consider the country which he was leaving. The old works at Monterrey, he thought, might be so repaired as to render that place tenable, and make it serve as a base for his line of operations. There and in the little town of Verin, on the opposite side of the Tamega, which contained about 2000 inhabitants, scarcely twenty persons had remained; and the French began to doubt the saying of Buonaparte, that men with bayonets could want for nothing. The fugitives, however, had left wine in Verin; and in order to pay some part of his establishment, Soult raised a few thousand pounds by a loan from the troops, ... part of the money which had been thrown away in Sir John Moore’s retreat. General Merle was left to collect his division there, forming the reserve, and the rest of the army advanced down the Tamega, to enter Portugal, before any effectual preparations could be made for resisting them. Marshal Soult was so apprehensive ♦OPERATIONS DE M. SOULT, 107–111, 115.♦ lest the troops should suffer in health, that when they crossed the river by a ford little more than knee deep, he erected two temporary bridges there for the infantry. ♦CHAVES.♦ Chaves is the frontier town of Portugal on that side, as Monterrey is that of Spain; both are on the Tamega, a river which, rising in the Sierra de S. Mamed, and watering the fertile vales of Monterrey and Oimbra, enters Portugal at Chaves, turns again into Galicia among the mountains of Barroso, and re-entering _Tras os Montes_, joins the Douro at _S. Miguel de Entre ambos os Rios_ with a stronger and larger volume of waters than is borne to it by any other of its tributary streams. Chaves is known to have been the _Aquæ Flaviæ_ of the Romans, so named because of its hot springs, and in honour of its founder Vespasian. The baths, when flattery in course of nature was out of date, supplanted the memory of the Emperor; and the place then obtained the more appropriate name of _Aquæ Calidæ_, which in process of time was abbreviated and corrupted into Chaves. The springs are said to be more efficacious than any other in Portugal; but the buildings which formerly served to accommodate invalids who came to seek relief from these waters were demolished by the Conde de Mesquitella, toward the close of the seventeenth century, in order that the guns might command the approach on that side without impediment: he has been censured for this as having committed a certain mischief for the sake of a frivolous precaution. At that time Chaves was considered a place of importance. The walls were now in many places fallen to decay, and though the citadel was in better repair, both it and the town were commanded from