As I lay on the ground, faint with the loss of blood and unable to rise, some of our fellows rode over me, and being hit on the head by one of their horses, I lost consciousness. When I came to myself the skirmish was over, nearly the whole of the French rear-guard had been taken prisoners or cut to pieces, and a surgeon was dressing my wounds. This done, I was removed in an ambulance to Salamanca. The historic old city, with its steep, narrow streets, numerous convents, and famous university, had been well-nigh ruined by the French, who had pulled down half the convents and nearly all the colleges, and used the stones for the building of forts, which, a few weeks previously, Wellington had bombarded with red-hot shot. The hospitals being crowded with sick and wounded, I was billeted in the house of a certain Señor Don Alberto Zamorra, which (probably owing to the fact of its having been the quarters of a French colonel) had not taken much harm, either during the French occupation of the town or the subsequent siege of the forts. Don Alberto gave me a hearty, albeit a dignified welcome, and being a Spanish gentleman of the old school, he naturally placed his house, and all that it contained, at my disposal. I did not, of course, take this assurance literally, and had I not been on the right side, I should doubtless have met with a very different reception. All the same, he made a very agreeable host, and before I had been his guest many days we became fast friends. Don Zamorra was old, nearly as old as I am now; and as I speedily discovered, he had passed the greater part of his life in Spanish America, where he had held high office under the crown. He could hardly talk about anything else, in fact, and once he began to discourse about his former greatness and the marvels of the Indies (as South and Central America were then sometimes called) he never knew when to stop. He had crossed the Andes and seen the Amazon, sailed down the Orinoco and visited the mines of Potosi and Guanajuata, beheld the fiery summit of Cotopaxi, and peeped down the smoky crater of Acatenango. He told of fights with Indians and wild animals, of being lost in the forest, and of perilous expeditions in search of gold and precious stones. When Zamorra spoke of gold his whole attitude changed, the fires of his youth blazed up afresh, his face glowed with excitement, and his eyes sparkled with greed. At these times I saw in him a true type of the old Spanish Conquestadores, who would baptize a cacique to save him from hell one day, and kill him and loot his treasure the next.