plains of Castile, benighted, charged with a wine-skin for which I had no use, and with no knowledge whatever of the whereabouts of my musket, beyond that it was somewhere in my Lord Wellington’s army.  But my Englishman was either a very honest fellow, or else extremely thirsty, and at last contrived to advertise me of his new position.  Now, the English sentry in Castile, and the wounded hero in the Durham public-house, were one and the same person; and if he had been a little less drunk, or myself less lively in getting away, the travels of M. St. Ives might have come to an untimely end.

I suppose this woke me up; it stirred in me besides a spirit of opposition, and in spite of cold, darkness, the highwaymen and the footpads, I determined to walk right on till breakfast-time:  a happy resolution, which enabled me to observe one of those traits of manners which at once depict a country and condemn it.  It was near midnight when I saw, a great way ahead of me, the light of many torches; presently after, the sound of wheels reached me, and the slow tread of feet, and soon I had joined myself to the rear of a sordid, silent, and lugubrious procession, such as we see in dreams.  Close on a hundred persons marched by torchlight in unbroken silence; in their midst a cart, and in the cart, on an inclined platform, the dead body of a man—­the centre-piece of this solemnity, the hero whose obsequies we were come forth at this unusual hour to celebrate.  It was but a plain, dingy old fellow of fifty or sixty, his throat cut, his shirt turned over as though to show the wound.  Blue trousers and brown socks completed his attire, if we can talk so of the dead.  He had a horrid look of a waxwork.  In the tossing of the lights he seemed to make faces and mouths at us, to frown, and to be at times upon the point of speech.  The cart, with this shabby and tragic freight, and surrounded by its silent escort and bright torches, continued for some distance to creak along the high-road, and I to follow it in amazement, which was soon exchanged for horror.  At the corner of a lane the procession stopped, and, as the torches ranged themselves along the hedgerow-side, I became aware of a grave dug in the midst of the thoroughfare, and a provision of quicklime piled in the ditch.  The cart was backed to the margin, the body slung off the platform and dumped into the grave with an irreverent roughness.  A sharpened stake had hitherto served it for a pillow.  It was now withdrawn, held in its place by several volunteers, and a fellow with a heavy mallet (the sound of which still haunts me at night) drove it home through the bosom of the corpse.  The hole was filled with quicklime, and the bystanders, as if relieved of some oppression, broke at once into a sound of whispered speech.

My shirt stuck to me, my heart had almost ceased beating, and I found my tongue with difficulty.

‘I beg your pardon,’ I gasped to a neighbour, ’what is this? what has he done? is it allowed?’