Colonel Trant removed them as soon as possible out of the city, and separating them from the other troops, stationed them in advance at Mealhada. The Commander-in-chief being duly apprized of what had occurred, gave orders that these troops should remain under his command; and the men, whose intentions had been good when their conduct was most irregular, were thus brought again into the line of duty. ♦COL. TRANT TAKES A POSITION UPON THE VOUGA.♦ With this motley force, a week after the capture of Porto had been known, Colonel Trant set forth. Taking the students’ corps under his ♦APRIL 6.♦ own command, he advanced toward Aveiro, and effected the important purpose of securing the boats and provisions in that port. The right ♦1809. APRIL.♦ column, under Lieutenant-Colonel Campbell (who had escaped from the carnage at Porto), he sent to the bridge of Vouga. That river (the Vacca of the ancients) rises in the Serra de Alcoba, and having received the Portugueze Agueda, which brings an equal volume of waters, enters the Lake of Aveiro, and forms a harbour there not less beautiful than singular: it is separated from the sea by two long wings of sand, and if the entrance were but good, would be perhaps the most commodious and capacious in Europe. A party of the enemy had crossed by the bridge of Vouga, and recrossed by that of Marnel, leaving in all the intermediate places the accustomed marks of their sacrilegious barbarity. They were part of a considerable cavalry force, under General Franceschi. For having taken Porto, and being masters of the Douro, the French, accustomed to consider military posts and the course of rivers as every thing, and the people as nothing in the scale, held that the country as far as the Mondego was already theirs by right of conquest; and Franceschi’s division would have advanced to occupy Coimbra if he had not thought that the force opposed to him was respectable both in numbers and quality. Its number, which the enemy supposed to be from ten to twelve thousand, did not in reality exceed 2000, even after two companies of grenadiers had joined them from Guarda. They had been stationed there under Camp-Marshal Manoel Pinto Bacellar’s command; but choosing to act upon their own judgement in those days of general insubordination, they compelled their officers to conduct them to the Vouga, as the place where they might soonest be enabled to act against the invaders of their country. With regard to the quality of this little force, the French supposed that there were English troops with it, and a great proportion of English officers. A panic seized Campbell’s men; they fled towards Coimbra; some of the fugitives joined Trant, and added in no slight degree to the anxieties of his situation by the alarm which they communicated. The academical corps indeed, under his immediate command, was one in which he placed just confidence; but the fatal consequence of exposing the flower of a nobility and gentry like ordinary lives