therein the Gallicians found safety. Soult, informed of Ney’s retreat and of sir Arthur Wellesley’s arrival on the Tagus, ceased to pursue Romana, and marched to Zamora, where his sick had been before sent, and where his brother, general Soult, had conducted three or four thousand stragglers and convalescents. Here, also, he requested the king to send the artillery and stores necessary to re-equip the second corps; and here he proposed to give his harassed troops some rest, for they had now been for eight months incessantly marching and fighting, and men and officers were alike dispirited by the privations they had endured, and by the terrible nature of a war in which the most horrid scenes were daily enacted. [Sidenote: S. Journal of Operations MSS.] To put the king in possession of his views, Soult sent general Franceschi to Madrid; but this celebrated officer, refusing an escort, fell into the hands of the _Capuchino_. Being transferred to Seville, the central junta, with infamous cruelty, treated him as if he had been a criminal instead of a brave soldier, and confined him in a dungeon at Carthagena. The citizens there, ashamed of their government, endeavoured to effect his escape; but he perished at the moment when his liberation was certain. When his young wife, a daughter of count Mathieu Dumas, heard of his fate, she refused all nourishment; and, in a few days, by her death, added one more to the thousand instances of the strength of woman’s affections. The 25th of June, Soult reached Puebla de Senabria. The 28th, he marched to Mombuey. The 29th and 30th, he crossed the Esla, by the bridges of San Pelayo and Castro Gonzales. The 2d of July, he entered Zamora, having previously rejected a proposition of Ney’s, that the two corps should jointly maintain Gallicia, a rejection which induced the duke of Elchingen to evacuate that province. [Illustration: _Plate 6. to face Pa. 326._ _Sketch Explanatory of NEY & SOULT’S_, OPERATIONS IN GALLICIA, in June 1809. _London. Published by T. & W. BOONE, July 1829._] To effect this, Ney formed a camp near Betanzos; and, on the 22d of July, withdrew his garrisons from Coruña and Ferrol, having previously destroyed all the stores and arsenals and disabled the land defences. Nevertheless, his influence was still so powerful that captain Hotham, commanding the English squadron, off Coruña, seeing the hostile attitude maintained by the inhabitants, landed his seamen on the 24th, and spiked the guns on the sea-line; and, in like manner, compelled a Spanish garrison, left by Ney in the forts of Ferrol, to surrender on the 26th. The marshal, however, marched, unmolested, by the high road to Astorga, where he arrived on the 30th, having brought off all his own sick and those of the second corps also, who had been left in Lugo. Thus Gallicia was finally delivered.