The Junta of the Asturias craved the assistance of Britain, even while the shattered wrecks of Trafalgar lay rotting on the sandy coast of Andalusia. Three years had committed those days of strife to oblivion, or nearly so, and arms, ammunition, clothing, and money were freely given to the patriots, while all the Spanish prisoners were sent home. Then, Sir John Moore, who commanded the British forces in Portugal, a small but determined "handful," was ordered to advance into Spain against the vast forces of the Duke of Dalmatia, which brings us now to the exact period of our own humble story, from which we have no intention of diverging again into the history of Europe. The body of troops among which our hero formed a unit, sailed in transports from Spithead, and in the Channel, and when Portland lights were twinkling out upon the weather-beam, poor Quentin endured for the first time the horrors of sea-sickness, and lay for hours half-stifled in a close dark berth, unheeded and forgotten, overpowered by the odour of tar, paint, and bilge, and by a thirst which he had not the means of quenching, for he was helpless, unable to move and longed only for death. It was no spacious, airy, and gigantic _Himalaya_, no magnificent screw-propeller like the _Urgent_, the _Perseverance_, or any other of our noble steam transports that, on this occasion received the head-quarters of the "King's Own Borderers," but a clumsy, old, and leaky tub, bluff-bowed and pinck-built, with her top-masts stayed forward, and her bowsprit tilted up at an angle of 45 degrees, and having a jack-staff rigged thereon. She was a black-painted bark of some four hundred tons, with the figures "200 T."--(signifying Transport No. 200)--of giant size appearing on her headrails. Between floors or decks hastily constructed for the purpose, the poor soldiers were stowed in darkness, discomfort, and filth. The officers were little better off in the cabin, and hourly their servants scrambled, quarrelled, and swore in the cooks' galley, about their several masters' rank and seniority in the order of boiling kettles and arranging frying-pans, whilst the hissing spray swept over them every time the old tub staggered under her fore course, and shipped a sea instead of riding buoyantly over it. In the mighty stride taken by civilization of late years, when steam and electricity alike conduce to the annihilation of time and space, the soldiers of the Victorian age know little of what their fathers in the service underwent, when old George III. was King. In stench, uncleanness, and lack of comfort and accommodation, our shipping were then unchanged from those which landed Orange William's Dutchmen at Torbay, or which conveyed our luckless troops in after years to the storming of the Havannah or the bombardment of Bocca Chica.