Fast flowed the blood, and the torture of the complicated wound was terrible! His hands were become cold and clammy, and his face grew deadly pale in the dusky twilight. "Colonel Graham of Balgowan, and Captain Woodford of the Guards, are both gone for surgeons," said Quentin, in his ear, while Captain Hardinge now strove in vain to stop the crimson current with his sash; "they will soon be here." "You will recover from your injuries," said Hardinge; "I can perceive it, Sir John, by the expression of your eyes." "No, Hardinge," said he, gravely; "I feel that to be impossible!" Several times he made the bearers turn him round that he might behold the field of battle, and then a sublime expression stole over his fine face on seeing that everywhere the French were falling back, and that his slender army, after all its sufferings, was triumphant! At this moment a spring waggon passed, in which lay Colonel Wynch, of the 4th Regiment, who was wounded. "Who's in that blanket?" asked the colonel, faintly. "Sir John Moore, most severely wounded," replied Quentin. On hearing this, the good colonel, though bleeding fast, insisted on letting his general have the waggon; but the Highlanders urged that they would carry him easier in the blanket, "so they proceeded with him to his quarters in Corunna, weeping as they went." Still the echoing musketry pealed through the murky air, and still the death-dealing blaze reddened the dusk of the coming evening. Heavily it volleyed at times in the intervals between the cannon on the rocks, and through the mingled haze up came the blood-red disc of the winter moon. Great clouds of white powder smoke crept sluggishly along the earth, and through it the flashes of the French guns above Elvina came redly and luridly out. On being brought to his billet in Corunna, Sir John Moore was laid on a pallet and examined, and then all could see the terrible nature of his wound. The entire left shoulder was shattered; the arm hung by a piece of skin; the ribs over the heart were stripped of flesh and bruised to pieces, and the muscles of the breast were torn in long strips that had become interlaced by the recoil of the fatal cannon-ball. In the dusk of the gloomy apartment, where he lay rapidly dying on a poor mattrass, he recognised the face of Colonel Anderson, an old friend and comrade of twenty years and more. It was the third time Anderson had seen him borne from a field thus steeped in blood, but never before so awfully mangled. Moore pressed the hand of his old friend, who was deeply moved. "Anderson," said he, with a sad smile, "you know I have always wished to die in this way." Anderson answered only with his tears, yet he was a weather-beaten soldier, who had looked death in the face on many a hard-fought field. "Are the French beaten?" Moore asked of all who came in, successively, and the assurances that they were retiring fast soothed his dying moments.