every chance of enlightenment! But, thank Heaven! there are others who will spread the light amongst them:--the torch of British Liberty now burns over their heads; and they keep their eyes on it, in spite of the “holy” and hateful fogs that are ever rising around them. I entered Spain from Oitero. In crossing from the one country to the other a thin wood intervenes, and for six or seven miles through it, neither house nor hut is to be seen: it is level ground, and covered with brush-wood. A few goats and their herdsman were all the living things I saw while crossing it: not a bird flew over me. At the first village which I entered in Spain, I met with some British soldiers (detached) with a commissariat officer, who informed me that the centre column of the main army had entered Salamanca, headed by Lord Wellington, and that the French were retreating everywhere, without making any opposition. Next day I pushed on in hopes of overtaking the troops belonging to my division, and now the country forming a fine level, I was enabled to increase my speed. At length I could descry the wide and sweeping track of the advancing armies--in the abstract, melancholy to contemplate! The country was chiefly covered with a luxuriant crop of corn, over which the immense column of the army passed, with its baggage, artillery, and cattle:--the traces of the cavalry--of the infantry--and of the cannon, could be distinctly and plainly distinguished from each other; and although their road was through the high and firm corn, the pressure upon it was so great that nothing but clay could be seen, except at the verges of the tracks, where the broken and trampled wheat was less over-trodden. Then there was as much cut down for forage as destroyed by feet; the mark of the rough sickle of the commissaries, the dragoons, and the muleteers, were in patches all around, disfiguring the beautiful waving ocean of yellowing corn--_ocean_ indeed--nothing can give so just an idea of its expansion: the corn in that country, does not grow in fields enclosed like our English, but over the whole face of the land, making one wide plain of vegetation, sprinkled at various distances with little villages, which look like heaps of red tiles to the distant eye of the observer: I have counted not less than twenty-two villages within one circular view. Such was the country, nearly all the way to Palencia.