What this 'unpleasant adventure,' to which Slingsby referred--and to which I had often heard him refer before--might have been I cared not then to inquire; but walked on, more chilled than consoled by his rattling manner and by that mess-room raillery, which I have known to laugh many a wiser man than your humble servant, out of an honest and sincere passion; while it has also been the saving of many an inflammable "Newcome," or unfledged, but amatory ensign, from the lures of those passé garrison belles, whose feathers are beginning to moult, and whose brilliance is beginning to fade, after a long career of close flirtation, round-dancing, supper-crushes, cold fowl, ices, pink champagne, affectionate farewells in the grey morning, when the drowsy drum-boys beat reveillie, or when the route arrived, and each lover--a lover alas! but for the time--departed with his regiment to return no more. Of Paulina de Lucena (such a pretty name it is!) I had seen much during her short residence in Gibraltar, and had become--what shall I term it, for 'Ours' were not marrying men--charmed by her sweetness of temper and piquant manner, as well as by her acknowledged beauty. Jack Slingsby stigmatised this under the denomination of "being spooney;" but as I have a proper abhorrence of all that slang phraseology which is peculiar to the university, the barrack, the clubhouse, and the turf, I believe I shall quote honest Jack no more, but proceed in my own fashion. She was the only daughter of Lieutenant-Colonel Don Ignacio de Lucena, a Knight of San Ferdinando, an officer of Lancers in the service of the Queen of Spain, in one of whose battles he was taken prisoner by Cabrera, and shot in cold blood with fifty of his soldiers: for this ferocious Carlist behaved with such barbarity to the Constitutional Army that one of its officers, who had been a prisoner, assured me that at Valencia he and his comrades were subjected to such cruelty by their captors, that after a thousand sufferings, on being denied food, they were driven to the dreadful necessity of devouring the body of a fellow captive.* * A work published in Valencia positively asserts this. The profession of her father, together with the circumstance of one of her brothers being in the Spanish sea service, and another in the army of Portugal, caused her to view with a favourable eye all who have the honour to live by the sword; and my small smattering of Spanish, which I picked up in those idle hours of a garrison life that otherwise must have hung heavily over me, gave me every facility for cultivating a friendship which had in it everything that might serve to dazzle and charm a young man; for with the idea of Andalusia and Spanish beauty we are apt to conjure up so much of love and of romance that the imagination gets the better of the senses; besides, those rogues of travellers and romancers have always given us such exaggerated pictures of Spanish loveliness.