From a precipice above our encampment, we could view the sea, and the towns along the coast. It was now three years since we beheld it, during which time our hopes and wishes had often fondly turned to our native homes; each fresh campaign and each battle was reckoned the precursor of our return, but ‘by expectation every day beguiled,’ we had almost begun to despair of ever beholding it again, when our recent successes, and the sight of the ocean which encircled the land of our birth, produced the most lively hopes and pleasing anticipations. A more than common friendly feeling was displayed amongst us; each saw in his comrade’s face the reflection of the joy that animated his own heart. The mountain air braced our nerves, and gave us a bounding elasticity of spirit, which rose superior to every thing. A few of us who were drawn together by congeniality of sentiment and disposition, used to assemble and wander up among the giant cliffs with which we were surrounded, and perching ourselves in a cranny, would sit gazing on the ocean and ships passing, with emotions which I have felt, but cannot describe. Its expansive bosom seemed a magic mirror, wherein we could read our future fortune,—a happy return from all our dangers; smiling friends, with all the early loved associations of childhood and youth, swam before our hope-dazzled imaginations, and we sat and sung the songs of Scotland while the tears trickled down our cheeks. He who has never heard the melodies of his native land sung in a foreign country, is ignorant of a pleasure that nothing can surpass. But we were not all doomed to realise those pleasing anticipations: many found their graves in the valleys which we then overlooked. Lord Wellington having prepared every thing for an attack on the French position in the valley, on the 10th of November, about two o’clock in the morning, we assembled, and having marched down to the foot of the hill, on a signal given by a gun firing, the attack commenced; that on the enemy’s left was made under the direction of General Hill, by the second and sixth divisions, supported by a division of Portuguese and Spaniards. Marshal Beresford commanded the centre, consisting of our division, the fourth and seventh, supported by a division of Spaniards.