Something of this kind was what Quentin had long dreaded; but disdaining any attempt to explain or expostulate, and exasperated by the injustice to which he was subjected, he clutched his musket and said sternly-- "Stand back, fellow!" "Ha! _perro y ladron_ (dog and thief)--you will have it, then!" With head stooped, body crouching, and knife drawn, the Spaniard was springing like a tiger upon Quentin, when the brass butt of Brown Bess, swung by no sparing or erring hand, fell full on his left temple, from whence it slid very unpleasantly down on his collar-bone, and tumbled him bleeding and senseless on the ground. After this, Quentin, who was in no mood to feel any compunction about the affair, turned and left him to recover as he might, resolving, until in a more secure neighbourhood, not to indulge his taste for the picturesque or antique, and feeling exceeding thankful that he had not left his musket as usual in his tent. "You were just in time, sir," said a voice, as Quentin turned to leave the ruined aqueduct; "an instant later and that Spanish thief had put his knife into you." The speaker was Allan Grange, of the 25th, who, stooping down, took from Trevino's relaxed hand his knife, a very ugly pig-butcher-like weapon. A guerilla, doubtless some friend of Trevino's, was hastening forward at this moment, but on seeing Quentin joined by a comrade he drew back a little way, and so the affair ended for the time; but this was not the last that Quentin was fated to hear of the encounter. By the ruinous town of Medellin (the birthplace of the conqueror of Mexico), where the Guadiana was fabled of old to rise, after running twenty miles under ground; by the wretched town of Miajadas, and by Truxillo, with its feudal towers and Moorish walls, when the French had ruined alike the house in which Pizarro was born and the noble palace of the Conde de Lopesa, the division continued its march amid rough and stormy weather, and, after passing Talavera de la Reyna--so called from the queen of Alonzo XI., to distinguish it from other places of the same name--halted, on the 22nd day of November, at the Escurial, that magnificent palace, twenty-five miles from Madrid, built by Philip II. in commemoration of the battle of St. Quentin, a holy personage, to whom he solemnly dedicated it. With his regiment, our hero bivouacked outside the little village of Escurial de Abajo. The night was a fearful one of storm. Over the bare and desolate country the winter wind swept in tempestuous gusts and the rain fell in torrents, swelling all the streams of the Guadarama--for the weather was completely broken now. In that horrible bivouac poor Quentin lost his blanket--his whole household furniture. Near him lay a soldier's wife with a sick infant; he spread it over both and left it with them; when the regiment shifted its ground next day the mother and child dropped by the wayside, so Quentin never saw them or his blanket again.