fair sex who accomplished it, many of whom were somewhat stout and not very young. However, it had the desired effect. General Tate acknowledged afterwards that they had been taken for a regiment of regulars, and the French troops (greatly composed of convicts) utterly lost heart. If they had but realised that it took a matter of seven days for the news to travel to London, they need not have distressed themselves on the score of quick aid from England. In the meantime parties of marauders in a half-drunken state continued to prowl about the neighbourhood. A considerable number of militia and peasantry encountered five of these men, who were dragging with them a young calf. They dropped the calf and advanced to the combat, while our men, thinking the odds unfair, singled out five of our sailors (of whom Davy Jones was one), and Mr. Whitesides, a Liverpool gentleman who assisted, as a stranger, at the selection, dismissed them to their work with this benediction:— “Take time, my boys, and do it well!” The French soldiers fired, and one of our men fell, wounded in the foot; then it was the tars’ turn, and they fired with such judgment that three of the enemy lay flat on the ground, and the remaining two departed rapidly. One of the three proved to be dead, the other two badly wounded. This encounter of a few, with a multitude looking on, took one back to the old days of Arthur’s knights, or to the still older days of Goliath of Gath. Considerable numbers of Frenchmen were by this time in a very unpleasing state of body and mind in consequence of rash indulgence in port wine and poultry boiled in butter. They were captured in small groups by the peasantry, who laid in wait for them behind the gorse bushes which abound in this region, and who jumped out on them with scant ceremony whenever they had a chance. A man belonging to Llanunda village, taking a cautious peep through his own little window from the outside, perceived one of the enemy making free with his food and wine; the Frenchman was enjoying himself thoroughly, he had made an excellent fire from most of the furniture, and he was toasting his legs thereat as he sipped the generous wine with the air of a connoisseur. This was more than the Taffy could stand. He had not saved that wine from a wreck at considerable personal risk to see it sending a glow through the veins of a foreigner; he flung himself into the room with a strong expression behind his teeth and a hay-fork clenched tightly in his hand. The Frenchman jumped up and thrust with his bayonet at the master of the house, who turned aside the blow, then, taking the foe on his pitchfork, tossed him into the fire, as he might have pitched a truss of hay on to the rick. A party of marauders set forth with the view of plundering Manorowen, a gentleman’s seat in the vicinity; but being followed by a detachment of the Yeomanry, they returned in a very different manner from what they had anticipated.