It was while the troops were lingering at Portalegre and elsewhere along the Spanish frontier, that Lord Castlereagh's despatch, containing the first organized plan of the future campaign, arrived in Lisbon. In the northern provinces of Spain, thirty-five thousand horse and foot were to be employed; ten thousand of these were to be embarked from British ports, and the rest to be drafted from our army of occupation in Portugal; and these were supposed to be equal to cope with the vast hosts pouring through the many passes of the Pyrenees from France and Germany, and those which already blackened all the plains of Castile and Arragon. We have elsewhere mentioned the vast strength of the French army, whose head-quarters were at Vittoria. The brave but ill-fated Sir John Moore was ordered to take the field without delay with the troops that were under his own command. Some fortress or city (unnamed) in Galicia, or on the borders of the kingdom of Leon, was to be the place for concentrating the whole allied armies of Britain, Spain, and Portugal; and his specific plan of operations was _afterwards_ to be concerted with the stupid, jealous, and uncompromising local juntas, and the obstinate and impracticable Spanish generals. These orders were perilous, loose, and vague; they promised nothing, but only that war at any hazard was to be waged in Old Castile and on the banks of the Ebro. And now for a time let us change the scene to a not less tuneful or classic locality--the rocky hills and heather braes of Carrick's western shore. CHAPTER XIII. THE PARAGRAPH. "My kindred are dead, my love is fled; Courage, my heart, thou canst love no more; Pale is my cheek, my body is weak; Courage, my heart, 'twill soon be o'er. Dim are my eyes with tears of sorrow, They ache for a night without a morrow!" M.N.S. It was towards the end of the month--the last days of October, now. The acorns were falling from the moss-grown oaks, the hollies and hedge-rows were gay with scarlet berries and haws, the grey sea-gulls were often seen mingling with the black gleds and hoodie-crows far afield inshore. The redwing, the fieldfare, and the woodcock had come again to their old haunts on the braes of Rohallion, in the oakwood shaw, in the hawthorn birks that overhang the Girvan, and the deep carse land where the rushes grew and the water flowed of old.