Already the plunderers had been at work; an officer, covered with wounds, lay stripped, nearly nude, so his uniform had doubtless been a rich one. He was quite dead, and wore on his left arm a bracelet of female hair--a love relic; his head rested in the lap of a beautiful Spanish girl, so dark that she was half like a mulatto or gitana of Granada, and such she appeared to be by her picturesque costume. She was weeping bitterly, and over her dark cheeks and quivering lips the hot tears fell upon the cold face of the dead man. Her sobs were quite inaudible, for her grief was too deep for utterance. Close by, with the medals of many an honourable battle on his breast, lay a grey-haired grenadier of the Garde Impériale, who had died about twenty minutes before, and the calm of dissolution was smoothing out the wrinkles that care, it might be a hidden sorrow, had traced upon his now ghastly face--so smoothly then that he became in aspect almost young again, as when, perhaps, a conscript he left his father's cottage and his mother's arms. As Quentin rode on many called to him for succour that he was unable to yield, and to their piteous cries he was compelled to turn a deaf ear. Many lay wounded, faint and unseen, among the long rich grass, where they were lulled alike by weakness and the hum of insect life awaking with the rising sun; and these scarcely noticed him as he trotted slowly past, carefully guiding his horse among them. Tormented by thirst, many crawled, like bruised worms, to where a little runnel ran down the green slope from San Cristoval, and drank thirstily of its water in the hollow of their hands, and without a shudder, though the purity of the stream was tainted by blood, for further up lay a soldier of the Cameron Highlanders, dead, with his head buried in the stream. He, too, had crawled there; but the weight of his knapsack had pressed his head and shoulders below the water, and thus, unable to rise from weakness, the poor fellow had actually been choked in a hole about twelve inches deep. No stragglers were visible, and an awful stillness had succeeded to the roar of sound that rung there yesternight; and now from his reverie Quentin was roused by the boom of a cannon at a distance. Others followed rapidly, and at irregular intervals. It was the French guns above St. Lucia firing over the flat point of San Diego on the last of the transports and the last of our troops who were embarking. Hill's brigade had now left the citadel, and Beresford, with the rearguard, had already put off from the shore. Such were the startling tidings Quentin received from a mounted Spaniard, a fellow not unlike a contrabandista, who passed, spurring with his box-stirrups recklessly over the field towards Santiago. On hearing this, Quentin instantly galloped towards the harbour.