"I would my weary course were o'er, Yet scarce can look for end save this, To dash to pieces on the shore, Or founder in the dark abyss. Fond thoughts, sweet hopes! oh, far more blest My bosom had it never known Your presence, since in vain possest, To lose you while you seemed my own." RODRIGUEZ LOBO. He rapidly learned that the court-martial was in the garrison orders to assemble on the 5th instant, and that charges of the most serious nature, involving, perhaps, the terrible penalty of--death, were to be brought against him! What sudden mystery--what inexplicable horror was this? On the night he entered Alva he was relieved from the humiliation of an armed escort or guard by the influence of Askerne and Warriston, who both bound themselves by their parole of honour for his appearance whenever required. He was thus at liberty to go about the town, but he cared not to avail himself of it, and remained in his quarters. The evening of the 4th of December was dull and gloomy. Setting amid saffron haze and shorn of all his beams, the lurid sun looming large and crimson like a wondrous globe, shed a steady light along the waters of the Tormes, a deep stream, which there rolls under a high and ancient bridge, that was afterwards blown up when the British retreated from Burgos. An old Moorish wall surrounds Alva, which stands on the slope of a hill, and there, above its flat-terraced mansions, rises the great palace of the powerful Dukes of Alva and Berwick, where Ferdinand Alvarez of Toledo, the terror of the Low Countries and the institutor of "the Court of Blood," first saw the light. In an angle of the Moorish rampart, then crumbling in ruins, stands a high round tower of considerable strength and antiquity. Herein was posted the quarter-guard of the 1st Brigade, and in an upper chamber Quentin had his billet, and there he sat alone, after the day's march, left to his own reflections, and these were mournful and gloomy enough. The aspect of this chamber was little calculated to raise his drooping spirit. Almost destitute of furniture, it was built of massive stone, vaulted, and had three narrow windows, the sides and horse-shoe arches of which were covered with elaborate zigzag Moorish ornaments, arabesques, and uncouth inscriptions, which, though he knew it not, were texts and quotations from the Koran in Arabic. These had probably been gilded and gaudily coloured once, but now were simply coated with mouldy whitewash. One of these windows opened to the hill on the slope of which stands Alva, and afforded a view of its tiled and terraced roofs, all drenched by the recent rain. Another faced the mountains of Leon, and the third showed the narrow gorge through which the red and swollen Tormes lay rolling under the bridge; beyond which, on an eminence, were posted a brigade of field guns and a cavalry picquet; the horses were linked together, and the troops cloaked.