It is all forgotten now, and nothing matters much, I mused, as I wandered up the dark avenue of cypress, yew, and pine that leads to the low three-arched façade of the old monastery. Before the quaint little one-storey porch, faced with designs of coats-of-arms, flowers, and scrolls in black and white mosaic, stands an ancient cross, and within the entrance is the tiny cloister and church that alone remains of the monastery. I wandered into the dim cloister full of thoughts of Bussaco’s baptism of blood, though it was all quiet and peaceful now in this humble retreat. At each corner of the cloister stands a dismantled altar, faced with coloured tiles of Talavera majolica, and the walls between the windows are hung with mouldering and tattered canvases of dead and gone Carmelites—saintly men whose bones lie beneath our feet and in the little green enclosure formed by the cloister. Around the walls on three sides are the doors of the cells, each door covered, as are the timbers of the cloister, with rough cork bark, which adds to the appearance of antiquity. One picture attracted my attention, a poor defaced painting, faded by time and weather, representing at full length a white-clad monk holding a skull in his left hand, and in his right a scroll. Something noble and dignified in the appearance of the face attracted me, and I tried to decipher the almost effaced inscription on the scroll. It was difficult, but at last I read that the monk was the “Reverend Father, Fray Luis de Jesus,” who in the world had been called the Marquis of Mancera, when the seventeenth century was young. And beneath the name this distich ran:— “A morte me fas deixar O que me podia danar.” As I pondered on this curious couplet, “Death makes me leave What might me grieve,” in the shadowy cloister, there came towards me a phantom of the past. It was an old, old man dressed in brown undyed homespun, short jacket, and breeches of a bygone fashion, and the universal black knitted stocking nightcap of the Portuguese peasant. He hobbled out of the cell where the great duke had slept the nights before the battle; and as he came slowly towards me, supported by a long staff, he courteously doffed his cap, and wished me good day. He was, he told me, ninety-three years old, but his eyes were still bright and his skin clear, and I fell into discourse with the ancient, as we rested together upon a bench in the darkling cloister, through the end door of which a bright splash of orange sunlight sent shimmering waves into the dimness.