where perhaps she had been presiding at some part of the evening, advanced eagerly a middle-aged woman.  The sight of my newspaper it was that had drawn her attention upon myself.  The victory which we were carrying down to the provinces on this occasion was the imperfect one of Talavera.  I told her the main outline of the battle.  But her agitation, though not the agitation of fear, but of exultation rather, and enthusiasm, had been so conspicuous when listening, and when first applying for information, that I could not but ask her if she had not some relation in the Peninsular army.  Oh! yes:  her only son was there.  In what regiment?  He was a trooper in the 23d Dragoons.  My heart sank within me as she made that answer.  This sublime regiment, which an Englishman should never mention without raising his hat to their memory, had made the most memorable and effective charge recorded in military annals.  They leaped their horses—­over a trench where they could, into it, and with the result of death or mutilation when they could not.  What proportion cleared the trench is nowhere stated.  Those who did, closed up and went down upon the enemy with such divinity of fervor—­(I use the word divinity by design:  the inspiration of God must have prompted this movement to those whom even then he was calling to his presence)—­that two results followed.  As regarded the enemy, this 23d Dragoons, not, I believe, originally three hundred and fifty strong, paralyzed a French column, six thousand strong, then ascending the hill, and fixed the gaze of the whole French army.  As regarded themselves, the 23d were supposed at first to have been all but annihilated; but eventually, I believe, not so many as one in four survived.  And this, then, was the regiment—­a regiment already for some hours known to myself and all London, as stretched, by a large majority, upon one bloody aceldama—­in which the young trooper served whose mother was now talking with myself in a spirit of such hopeful enthusiasm.  Did I tell her the truth?  Had I the heart to break up her dreams?  No.  I said to myself, to-morrow, or the next day, she will hear the worst.  For this night, wherefore should she not sleep in peace?  After to-morrow, the chances are too many that peace will forsake her pillow.  This brief respite, let her owe this to my gift and my forbearance.  But, if I told her not of the bloody price that had been paid, there was no reason for suppressing the contributions from her son’s regiment to the service and glory of the day.  For the very few words that I had time for speaking, I governed myself accordingly.  I showed her not the funeral banners under which the noble regiment was sleeping.  I lifted not the overshadowing laurels from the bloody trench in which horse and rider lay mangled together.  But I told her how these dear children of England, privates and officers, had leaped their horses over all obstacles as gaily as hunters to the morning’s