While the troops of the light division, as already noticed, were strutting about with the consciousness of surpassing excellence, menacing and insulting a foe for which their persons' knapsacks and all would barely have sufficed for a luncheon--a dish of mortification was served up for those of our corps, by the hands of their better half, which was not easy of digestion. To speak of the wife of a regiment is so very unusual as to imply that she must have been some very great personage--and without depriving her of the advantage of such a magnificent idea, I shall only say that she was the only wife they had got--for they landed at Lisbon with eleven hundred men and only one woman. By what particular virtues she had attained such a dignified position among them, I never clearly made out, further than that she had arrived at years of discretion, was what is commonly called a useful woman, and had seen some service. She was the wife of a sturdy German, who plyed in the art of shoemaking, whenever his duties in the field permitted him to resort to that species of amusement, so that it appeared that she had beauty enough to captivate a cobbler, she had money enough to command the services of a jackass, and finally she proved she had wit enough to sell us all, which she did the first favourable opportunity--for, after plying for some months at the tail of her donkey at the tail of the regiment, and fishing in all the loose dollars which were floating about in gentlemen's pockets, (by those winning ways which ladies know so well how to use when such favourable opportunities offer,) she finally bolted off to the enemy, bag and baggage, carrying away old Coleman's all and awl. It was one of those French leave-takings which man is heir to, but we eventually got over it, under the deepest obligation all the time for the sympathy manifested by our friends of the 43d and 52d. The movements of the enemy were at length unshackled by the fall of Ciudad Rodrigo, after a desperate defence, which gave immortal glory to its old governor Herrasti, and his brave Spanish garrison--and although it may appear that I am saying one word in honour of the Spaniards for the purpose of giving two to the British, yet my feelings are too national to permit me to pass over a fact which redounds so much to the glory of our military history--namely, that in this, the year 1810, the French were six weeks in wresting from the Spaniards the same fortress which we, in the year 1812, carried, with fire and sword, out of the hands of the French in eleven days!