wounded in trying to get out, falling still alive, into the hands of the enemy. On finding ourselves outside, we leaped for joy. We cast a glance over the roofs of the quarter, and saw at a distance the batteries of the French. We advanced on all fours for a good distance, exploring the lay of the land, leaving two sentinels in the gap to pop off a gun at anyone who should seek to slip up by them. We had not gone twenty paces when we heard a great noise of voices and laughter which seemed to us to be French. And so it was; from a broad balcony those rascals were looking at us and laughing. They were not slow in firing upon us, but protected behind the chimneys, the angles and corners which the roof afforded, we answered them shot for shot, and replied to their oaths and exclamations by a thousand other invectives with which the lively imagination of Tío Garcés inspired us. At last we retreated, jumping to the roof of the next house. We believed it to be in the hands of our own men, and we entered by the window of a little upper room, supposing that the descent from there to the street would be easy, and that there we should be reinforced for the conclusion of the adventure that had carried us through passages, up stairways, through garrets, and over roofs. But we had scarcely set foot there, when we heard in the apartment below us the sound of many blows on the wall.
“They are beating in there,” said Tío Garcés, and in a second the French whom we had left in the house next us had passed to this one, where they met comrades.
“ Cuerno! Recuerno! Let us get out of this! The whole creation’s down below there.”
We passed on into another garret, and found our way to a ladder leading down to a large interior room, from whose doorway came the lively sound of voices, chiefly those of women. The noise of the fight seemed much further off, and we decided it must be at some distance. So we dropped down the ladder and found ourselves in a large room filled with