The sunlight died away behind me, and shed its last rays on the white walls, the square campanile and tall cypresses of a convent which crowned a height on my left; and on the red round towers of an old castle that topped a rock on my right; but both were in ruins and desolate, as the wars of the infidel Moors, ages ago, had left the first, and the desolating retreat of Marshal Massena had left the second. The older fragments of a Roman aqueduct lay between, and half hidden among wild shrubs. The pathway was rugged; untamed goats scrambled about; snakes hissed in the long grass, and eagles screamed in mid air. Ave Maria! it was impossible to conceive a place more dreary and desolate; but the way became still wilder, and as I progressed into the gorge of the Sierra, even the ruined works of man and the traces of his feet disappeared. I was in a desert, and, save the faint crescent moon, without a light or guide. As I rode slowly on, thinking of the bright golden moidores of our Lord St. Anthony, with which my pouch was blessed, and reflecting on the prize they would be for any sacrilegious picaros who might be hovering in this dark wilderness, ever and anon humming a song, muttering an ave, and feeling the percussion caps on my pistols, I suddenly met a strange figure in the dim moonlight--a goat-herd, as he seemed to me. He was clad in a zamarra of sheepskin, which he wore with the wool outwards; his white hair hung in tangled masses upon his shoulders; a bota was slung at his girdle, and he carried a stout Portuguese cajado, with a little cross stick nailed thereon, to give it more the aspect of a pastoral staff, than a weapon of defence. "Vaya usted con Dios, Señor Major," said he. "God be with you," I reiterated, a little scared on finding that this stranger knew my name; "you have the advantage of me, Señor Pastor." "Hombre, do you think so? but do not be alarmed, for I am an old Christian, without stain of Moor or Jew in my veins. I am no enchanter----" "Ave Maria, I should hope not!" "Yet I know that you have in your pouch the pay of St. Anthony of Lisbon, whom rogues and fools style of Padua--what the devil should he have to do with Padua?--in your left breast pocket, all in fair round moidores of gold--eh, señor?" "Very true, pastor," said I, slipping a finger into my near holster, and keeping my horse well in hand and beyond the reach of his cajado; "but how came you to know me?" "I know every officer and soldier in the regiment of Lagos as well as if I had made them--and you especially, Señor Major." "Well--and about the moidores," said I, uneasily; "you know of them, and what then?" "Merely this, Señor Don Joaquim; that if you would arrive at Barbacena to-morrow with the pay of the patron of the regiment of Lagos----" "In the kingdom of Algarve," suggested Jack Slingsby.