I rambled through the streets for some hours, revolving such thoughts as pressed upon me involuntarily by all I saw.  The same little grey homunculus that filled my “prince’s mixture” years before, stood behind the counter at Lundy Foot’s, weighing out rappee and high toast, just as I last saw him.  The fat college porter, that I used to mistake in my school-boy days for the Provost, God forgive me! was there as fat and as ruddy as heretofore, and wore his Roman costume of helmet and plush breeches, with an air as classic.  The old state trumpeter at the castle, another object of my youthful veneration, poor “old God save the King” as we used to call him, walked the streets as of old; his cheeks indeed, a little more lanky and tendinous; but then there had been many viceregal changes, and the “one sole melody his heart delighted in,” had been more frequently called in requisition, as he marched in solemn state with the other antique gentlemen in tabards.  As I walked along, each moment some old and early association being suggested by the objects around, I felt my arm suddenly seized.  I turned hastily round, and beheld a very old companion in many a hard-fought field and merry bivouack.  Tom O’Flaherty of the 8th.  Poor Tom was sadly changed since we last met, which was at a ball in Madrid.  He was then one of the best-looking fellows of his “style” I ever met,—­tall and athletic, with the easy bearing of a man of the world, and a certain jauntiness that I have never seen but in Irishmen who have mixed much in society.

There was also a certain peculiar devil-may-care recklessness about the self-satisfied swagger of his gait, and the free and easy glance of his sharp black eye, united with a temper that nothing could ruffle, and a courage nothing could daunt.  With such qualities as these, he had been the prime favourite of his mess, to which he never came without some droll story to relate, or some choice expedient for future amusement.  Such had Tom once been; now he was much altered, and though the quiet twinkle of his dark eye showed that the spirit of fun within was not “dead, but only sleeping,”—­to myself, who knew something of his history, it seemed almost cruel to awaken him to any thing which might bring him back to the memory of by-gone days.  A momentary glance showed me that he was no longer what he had been, and that the unfortunate change in his condition, the loss of all his earliest and oldest associates, and his blighted prospects, had nearly broken a heart that never deserted a friend, nor quailed before an enemy.  Poor O’Flaherty was no more the delight of the circle he once adorned; the wit that “set the table in a roar” was all but departed.  He had been dismissed the service!!—­The story is a brief one:—­

In the retreat from Burgos, the __ Light Dragoons, after a most fatiguing day’s march, halted at the wretched village of Cabenas.  It had been deserted by the inhabitants the day before, who, on leaving, had set it on fire; and the blackened walls and fallen roof-trees were nearly all that now remained to show where the little hamlet had once stood.