There was no objection made to this, so the soldier immediately took charge of the child. And well he acquitted himself in his responsibility: he regularly washed, dressed, and fed the little fellow, every morning; he would clamber over the hills and procure goats' milk for him, when even the officers could not obtain that luxury; and although not much of a cook, would boil his ration-meat into a nutritive jelly, as scientifically as the best of them, for the child. In less than two months, the little campaigner was very different in appearance from that which he exhibited when first taken in charge of the soldier; and he became a rosy-faced, chubby, hardy little hero, as ever bivouacked on the hills of Portugal. Month after month passed away, during which the regiment often moved about. Upon the march the soldier always found means of procuring a seat for the child upon one of the baggage mules; and he now became so interesting to all who knew him, that little difficulty in obtaining transport for him was to be met with. One time a muleteer would take the boy before him on his _macho_, or place him between two sacks or casks, upon the animal's back, and gibber Spanish to him as he jogged along; at other times he would find a seat on some officers' baggage, or “get a lift” in the arms of the men; nobody would refuse _little Johnny_ accommodation whenever he needed it. So far I heard from a soldier of the division in which the child was protected. What follows I witnessed myself. After the battle of Busaco, which was fought in the year following that of Talavera, the army retreated over at least one hundred and fifty miles of a country the most difficult to pass; steep after steep was climbed by division after division, until the whole arrived within the lines of Torres Vedras. The whole of this march, from the mountains of Busaco to the lines, was a scene of destruction and misery, not to the army, but to the unhappy population. Every pound of corn was destroyed, the wine-casks were staved, and the forage was burnt; the people in a flock trudging on before the army, to shelter themselves from the French, into whose hands, had they remained in their houses, they must have fallen. Infants barely able to walk; bedridden old people; the sick, and the dying—all endeavouring to make their way into Lisbon; for which purpose all the asses and mules that they could find were taken with them, and the poor animals became as lame as their riders by a very few days' marches. It was a severe measure of Lord Wellington's thus to devastate the country which he left behind him, but, like the burning of Moscow, it was masterly; for Massena being thus deprived of the means of supplying his army, was soon obliged to retrace his steps to Spain, pursued in his turn by the British, and leaving the roads covered with his starving people and slaughtered horses.