and left as they passed, and riding so close to the columns that the infantry were forced to halt in order to protect them. At Villa Franca even greater excesses were committed; the magazines were plundered, the bakers driven away from the ovens, the wine-stores forced, the doors of the houses were broken, and the scandalous insubordination of the soldiers was, indeed, a disgrace to the army. Moore endeavored to arrest this disorder, and caused one man, taken in the act of plundering a magazine, to be hanged. He also endeavored to send despatches to Sir David Baird, directing him to Corunna, instead of Vigo; but his messenger became drunk and lost his despatches, and this act cost the lives of more than four hundred men, besides a vast amount of suffering to the rest of the army. An unusual number of women and children had been allowed to accompany the army, and their sufferings were, indeed, dreadful to witness. Clark, in his history of the war, gives a heart-rending account of the horrors of this retreat. “The mountains were now covered with snow; there was neither provision to sustain nature nor shelter from the rain and snow, nor fuel for fire to keep the vital heat from total extinction, nor place where the weary and footsore could rest for a single hour in safety. The soldiers, barefooted, harassed and weakened by their excesses, were dropping to the rear by hundreds; while broken carts, dead animals, and the piteous appearance of women, with children, struggling or falling exhausted in the snow, completed the dreadful picture. It was still attempted to carry forward some of the sick and wounded;--the beasts that drew them failed at every step, and they were left to perish amid the snows.” “I looked around,” says an officer, “when we had hardly gained the highest point of those slippery precipices, and saw the rear of the army winding along the narrow road. I saw their way marked by the wretched people, who lay on all sides, expiring from fatigue and the severity of the cold, their bodies reddening in spots the white surface of the ground. A Portuguese bullock-driver, who had served the English from the first day of their arrival, was seen on his knees amid the snow, dying, in the attitude and act of prayer. He had, at least, the consolations of religion, in his dying hour. But the English soldiers gave utterance to far different feelings, in their last moments. Shame and anger mingled with their groans and imprecations on the Spaniards, who had, as they said, betrayed them. Mothers found their babes sometimes frozen in their arms, and helpless infants were seen seeking for nourishment from the empty breasts of their dead mothers. One woman was taken in labor upon the mountain. She lay down at the turning of an angle, rather more sheltered than the rest of the way from the icy sleet which drifted along; there she was found dead, and two babes which she had brought forth struggling in the snow. A blanket was thrown over her, to