The poverty of the oppressed and ill-used natives, wherever our course lay, was lamentable; the French, according to their regular system, carried famine and desolation in their train; paying for nothing, they drew their supplies by force of arms, and their marauding foragers overran the surrounding districts, forcing the peasantry, as well as those who lived in towns, to pay the expenses of their barbarous invasion. In consequence of the ravages committed on the people, there was nothing in their markets, or their shops, "a beggarly account of empty boxes;" and the lean and sallow proprietors were proofs sufficient of the unhappy state in which their land was placed. They were so terrified, that it was difficult to prevail on them to sell even what they could spare.--Upon demanding what we could obtain from them, the reply at all times was, "no hai nada aqui," or, "we have nothing here." Seeing us rather incredulous, and on being again requested, they would persist in the refusal, with a shrug of the shoulders, and passing the fore finger twice across the nose, crying out, "nada, nada;" but, when the finger was three times moved quickly over the nasal organ, with the scream of "nada, nada, nada," the affair was finally settled, and there was no further appeal from this hopeless gesticulation. Even when by great good luck, there was something to be had, there was still an obstacle in the way. In those days we were often puzzled by the language, and in trying to make ourselves understood, were forced to resort to a great variety of expedients. When our broken and disjointed phrases failed, we were driven to the use of signs and hieroglyphics; suiting the action to the word, we explained our wants by distorting the limbs and body into strange figures, symbolical of the article required. Officers and men were alike in this dilemma; and fortunate was the lucky genius who could jabber, though in a most indifferent way, for he was sure to get to windward of his less favoured comrades. The market-place was a stage, upon which many a brainless youth, with much more gold upon his jacket than ever his pocket carried, shewed off his slender stock of Portuguese, and palmed himself upon the natives as a person of the utmost consequence. Others expressed their wishes in a sort of gibberish, formed out of scraps of English, German, French and Latin, but without a syllable of the language wanted. The soldiers used a most extraordinary dialect, compounded of Irish, Gaelic, and the mother tongue, interlarded with a good supply of oaths, by which to impress the subject on the head-piece of the patient countrymen, who underwent their curses, rage, and sometimes worse, when the cry of "no intendes" was uttered by them.