I fell naturally into gloomy reflections on the events of the night. I need hardly say how bitter and mortifying they were: after all our toils and sanguine anticipations of ultimate success, to be thus robbed of the prize which we already grasped, as we thought, with a firm hand. Absorbed in these melancholy ruminations, accompanied from time to time by a groan from my companion, several hours passed away, during which the water continued rising higher and higher in the cabin, until it reached my middle, and I was obliged to hold my arm above it, for the salt-water made it smart. Fortunately the vessel grounded from the receding of the tide. Escape in our state being now quite out of the question, my companion and I were glad on the whole to be relieved from our present disagreeable situation by surrendering ourselves prisoners. The firing had now entirely ceased, and the French seemed satiated with the ample vengeance they had taken on us. As there was no gate near us, we were hoisted with ropes over the ramparts, which were here faced with brick to the top. A French soldier was ordered to show me the way to the hospital in the town. As we proceeded, however, my guide took a fancy to my canteen which still hung by my side, and laying hold of it without ceremony, was proceeding to empty its contents into his own throat. Though suffering with a burning thirst from loss of blood, I did not recollect till this moment that there was about two-thirds of a bottle of gin remaining in it. I immediately snatched it from the fellow's hand and clapping it to my mouth, finished every drop of it at a draught, while he vented his rage in oaths. I found it exceedingly refreshing, but it had no more effect on my nerves than small beer in my present state of exhaustion. The scene as we passed through the streets, strewed here and there with the bodies of our fallen soldiers, intermixed with those of the enemy, was, indeed, melancholy; even could I have forgotten for a moment how the account stood between the enemy and us, I was continually reminded of our failure, by the bodies of many of our people being already stripped of their upper garments. When we arrived at the hospital, I found one of the officers of my regiment, who had been taken prisoner, standing at the door. My face was so plastered with blood from a prick of a bayonet I had got in the temple from one of our soldiers, that it was some time before he knew me. In passing along the beds in the hospital, the first face I recognised was that of my friend Robertson, whom I had left for dead when our party retreated. Besides the wound he received in the head, he had received one in the wrist, after he fell.