When we reached the fort, we used every precaution to avoid alarming the French if there had been any there; but it was quite unnecessary, for their picquet had retired, without firing a shot. After placing a picquet in front, we set to work, and got up three guns, which we had brought with us. This kept us busy enough until morning; when we got a better view of the isolated place we had taken possession of. The fort itself was about a hundred yards square; but it had been completely demolished on its sea face, by the seamen of our fleet when the French advanced to the siege, and the others were all more or less in ruins. The bomb-proofs were nearly all destroyed. In what remained there was not shelter for the half of our men; and by a rule of division, often practised in the army, that little was made less by the officers appropriating the half of it to themselves. Day had not long dawned when the French gave us a salute from a small battery, in the village at Fort Lewis; but when we got our guns mounted, it was soon silenced. From that time we commenced with redoubled exertion to work at the battery—building up the parapets, and laying platforms for more guns. We were supplied with materials, viz., fascions, gabions, and sand-bags, from Cadiz. Here we were wrought like slaves, I may say, without intermission; for our worthy adjutant, who aimed at being a rigid disciplinarian, and was a great amateur in drill, was determined that no hard labour, or want of convenience for cleaning our things, should tempt him to deviate from a clean parade and formal guard-mounting every morning, even although we had been out all night under the rain on picquet, or carrying sand-bags and digging trenches up to the knees in mud. All the varied forms of duty known in a militia regiment, with which he was best acquainted, were by him indispensable; and in a place where we had no convenience for keeping our things in order, not even shelter for them, this exactness was certainly, to say the least of it, unnecessarily teasing. We were also obliged to stand sentry on different parts of the battery, full dressed, where there was no earthly use for us, unless for show; and I could perceive no reason the commandant and he had for their conduct, unless that, feeling the novelty of their situation—in command of a fort—they wished to ape, with their handful of men, all the importance of leaders of an army. We were driven from guard to working—working to picquet—picquet to working again, in a gin-horse round of the most intolerable fatigue; which we never could have borne for any length of time, exposed as we often were to sun and rain, in a climate like that of Cadiz. But, even with all this we had the mortification to find our best endeavours repaid with the most supercilious haughtiness, and the worst of usage. We were allowed little time to sleep; and that little often interrupted.