"Ugh!" grumbled Monkton on this night, "who, with brains in his head-piece, would become a soldier?" "You remind me," said Askerne, as he shook the water for the twentieth time from his bear-skin cap, "of a story I have heard of Maitland, one of our early colonels who served on the staff of the Duke of Marlborough. It was at Blenheim, I think, when he was riding along the line accompanied by the colonel and another aide-de-camp, whose head was suddenly shattered by a cannon shot from the Bavarian artillery. Perceiving that Maitland looked long and fixedly at the fallen man, Marlborough said angrily-- "'Colonel Maitland, what the devil are you wondering at?' "'Simply, that how a man possessed of so much brains as our poor friend, ever became a soldier,' replied Maitland, and the phlegmatic victor of Blenheim and Ramilies smiled as he rode on." Then the dinner during a halt on the march was not tempting, and the cuisine was so decidedly bad that even Monkton could not joke about it. The slices of beef fried in a camp-kettle lid, or broiled on an old ramrod--beef that had never been _cold_ (the miserable ration bullocks after being goaded in rear of the troops for miles by muleteers and mounted guerillas, being shot, flayed and cut up the moment the drum beat to prepare for dinner) was always tough as india-rubber; while the soup which the soldiers tried to make with a few handfuls of rice and the bones of the said bullocks, lacked only the snails mentioned by Peregrine Pickle, to make it resemble the famous black broth of the Spartans. A little more of this common-place detail, and then we have done. For all Quentin suffered, the novelty of treading a new soil and all the varied scenery of Portugal could scarcely make amends; yet there were times when he could not but view with interest and pleasure the old arches and aqueducts, the stony skeletons of departed Rome, the ruined amphitheatres and temples, especially that of Diana which Quintus Sertorius built at Evora, while remains of baths and cisterns, columns, capitals and cornices of marble and jasper lying prostrate among the reeds and weeds in wild places, made him think of Dominie Skaill and the rapture with which he would have lingered over them. Then there were the beautiful vineyards, the verdant valleys where the lemon and orange trees grew; the steep frowning sierras, wild and barren, but majestic; the fertile plain overlooked by the thirteen spires of Santarem; and the old Roman bridges, spanning rivers that rushed in foam down the granite steeps to mingle with the Tagus.