As she spoke she became sure that Jonathan was on the other side of the door, and the knowledge sent a thrill of happiness through her. She forgot that she acted the part of village lover, forgot that others might pass and hear her, forgot everything but the fact that Jonathan, her Jonathan, was close to her, separated from her only by the boarding of the green door. The years rolled back, the voice that had been enfeebled by pain was strengthened by love and selfforgetfulness. "Dearest, dearest," she cried, with an odd little break in her voice, “you must not be lonely any more, I have never forgotten, I have always, always loved you."

Some things she said she dropped her voice over; the faint murmur only, adding semblance to the part she had set out to play, reached the Rector as he crouched, his ear to the keyhole, his whole slender body trembling. For him also the years had rolled back, the chill breath of winter wafted to him the perfumes of spring, he saw the face of his Mary, young, ardent, tearstained, as she vowed to him that she would never forget him. He sighed, a long tremulous sigh; then he stifled it hurriedly, remembering where he stood, and as the voice on the other side of the partition rose higher in simpler, sweeter pleading, a spasm of painalmost of anger-passed over his face. Who was this village girl who dared to speak with the voice of his Mary? A sudden, desperate need to know, to be able to distinguish

her from amongst the crowd of village girls, strengthened his trembling limbs. He drew himself up to his full height, placed his hands upon the top of the high wall, and silently, stealthily, with an agility reborn in him from the days of his youth, drew himself up until he could look downward at the figures in the doorway.

Figures? There was only one! His eyes clouded mistily: was there some one here in the village, where all seemed serenity and peace and happiness,— his gaze sought the cottage homes he had so often envied, -who knew the sorrow of parting and of loneliness? He peered yet more closely at the woman standing alone where

many happy lovers had stood. Surely she was a lady? The truth was beating clamorously at his brain, but he dared not let it in. Ah! he knew now, this was the strangerlady who was lodging at Mrs Shore's. They said she was ill and had not very long to live, poor soul, poor soul.

"Dearest, I love you so, I have never forgotten you, Jonathan"-wavering, uncertain, now weak, now strong, the voice rose to him with the little catch in it that had been Mary's. The Rector's long thin body slipped lithely from the wall, he paused an instant, trembling, his ear once more against the keyhole; then his brain swung to certainty, paused on realisation.

With the gesture of a younger Jonathan he stooped, fumbled with the lock, and swiftly, silently, threw open the green door.

THERE are skirmishes which have changed the face of his tory, and there are battles on a great scale which have decided nothing. Among the latter was the fierce combat fought just a century ago, on July 27 and 28, 1809, by the banks of the Tagus. There were nearly a hundred thousand men drawn up in battle array between the bridge of Talavera and the foot of the Sierras, and by nightfall on the second day some fourteen thousand of these had been killed or wounded, or were among the "missing"; so that even reckoned by the more recent standards it was no inconsiderable engagement. And it deserves its place in history, if only because of the valour and energy displayed by French and English, and because it was fought out by solid bodies of the troops of the two great nations of Western Europe, brought fairly and squarely face to face. For the first time almost since the Middle Ages the English were fighting the French in a great battle on land, practically without allies. It is one of the amazing features of Talavera, that though there was a third army on the field, that army took hardly any part in the encounter. While Wellesley's troops and King Joseph's were engaged in their series of desperate and death-dealing struggles on the 28th of July, Cuesta, with a force much larger than the English and little smaller than that of the French, lay inactive and im

movable all the day. A small body had been detached to assist Wellesley, and it took a creditable share of the fighting on one of his flanks. But the greater part of the Army of Estremadura, 35,000 strong, never fired a shot all through the long summer hours in which 20,000 English were resisting the assault of double their own number of the enemy; threefourths of the Spaniards were merely distant spectators of the conflict. This alone would make Talavera one of the most curious battles in the annals of warfare.

It was curious in other ways. It came about as the result of a series of miscalculations, in which each party was mistaken as to the position and intentions of of the other; it had no tangible effect on the general strategic situation; victors and vanquished retired in opposite directions immediately afterwards; the dead and wounded shed their blood in vain, if indeed it be vain for brave men to suffer and to die for glory and a patriotic ideal and to prove at least that they can rise above the desire for comfort and safety. In the battle itself, and in the operations that preceded it, high military qualities were displayed and the grossest military ineptitude; for with the daring and discipline of the British troops must be contrasted the sluggishness of their allies; against the tactical skill of the great Irish

commander must be set the utter misconduct of the Spanish General Venegas and the incompetence of Cuesta, which rendered the success of the hard-fought field nugatory.

In the spring of 1809 the French seemed in secure possession of the Peninsula. Över 280,000 troops were under the eagles in the various provinces, with such famous soldiers at the head of the corps as Soult, Ney, Mortier, Suchet, and Victor; Joseph Bonaparte was supposed to be ruling at Madrid, with Jourdan at his side as Chief of the

Staff; the Spanish armies, defeated in one battle after another, were without discipline or training, and their commanders were quarrelling with one another and with the incapable Junta at Cadiz; the British troops under Sir John Moore had been driven back to their ships, and Soult at Oporto was preparing to sweep down on the force which still held Lisbon and complete the conquest of Portugal. But on April 22 Sir Arthur Wellesley landed at the Portuguese capital, and presently a startling change occurred. Instead of waiting for Soult to descend upon Lisbon, Wellesley marched straight upon Oporto, effected his masterly passage of the Douro, and drove the Marshal to a hasty and disorderly retreat. Soult escaped through the mountains into Galicia, with a shattered army that had lost its artillery, transport, stores, treasure chest, and ammunition-reserves.

With Portugal cleared and Soult's corps locked up among

the Galician mountains, while Ney was struggling with a Spanish army and hordes of guerillas in the Asturias, the road to Madrid along the line of the Tagus lay open. Two French Army Corps, those of Victor and Sebastiani, were protecting the capital; but General Cuesta, with the Army of Estremadura, amounting to 50,000 men, was in front of them, and General Venegas, with the Spanish Army of La Mancha, was on their flanks. Wellesley had good reason to believe that five-and-twenty thousand British troops cooperating with these two Spanish hosts could break down the French guard, occupy and hold the capital, and from that centre proceed to the gradual reconquest of the entire country.

He had yet to learn from bitter experience the complete untrustworthiness of his allies. He did not then know-though he soon found out-that the Spanish regiments, composed for the most part of raw levies, were without cohesion, discipline, or training, and quite incapable of executing the simplest manoeuvre; nor that Cuesta, the chief of one army, was an infirm, irascible, and obstinate old man, so enfeebled by age and illness that he had to be hoisted on his horse by a couple of grenadiers, and held in the saddle by his aidede-camp. This decrepit warrior was moreover vain, selfopinionated, and impracticable, at once vacillating and rash, and consumed by jealousy of Wellington, of his colleagues, and of the Junta, whom he

suspected of a design to dismiss him from his command. Nor did Sir Arthur know that the commander of the La Mancha Army, General Venegas, was not only ignorant of the art of war, but that he was dilatory and insubordinate, and much more anxious to thwart and supersede Cuesta than to overcome the French. And he was still unaware that no reliance whatever could be placed upon the promises of the Spanish Government. He had supposed that in a friendly country, which he had come to deliver from an invader, he could count upon supplies being furnished by the inhabitants and the local authorities. As a fact, the whole district had already been swept bare by the French and Spanish columns, and the British troops marched to Talavera and marched back again in a state of semi-starvation. It was all a valuable lesson to Wellington, which he did not forget. But in July 1809 he had still to learn the art of conducting a Spanish campaign.

armies should march along the line of the river to its junction with its tributary the Alberche, beyond Talavera, where Marshal Victor was posted to defend Madrid. The other French army corps, that of General Sebastiani, was south of the capital, near Toledo; and it was arranged that General Venegas should "contain" this force, avoiding a conflict if possible, so as to allow time for Victor unaided to be overwhelmed by the armies of Wellesley and Cuesta. The scheme miscarried owing to the incapacity, if not treachery, of Venegas. Moving his troops at a snail's pace, he wandered off to the eastward, and allowed Sebastiani to slip away from his front and join Victor, and such reserves as Jourdan and King Joseph could bring up from the Madrid garrison. Thus when the allied generals arrived at Talavera in the fourth week of July they found themselves confronted by 46,000 French troops strongly posted behind the Alberche. The Anglo-Spanish armies had a superiority of some 9000; but nearly two-thirds of the whole combination consisted of Cuesta's Spaniards, and Wellesley had already appraised their fighting quality at its true value.

On the 22nd of July Cuesta in one of his fitful spasms of impetuosity had suddenly attacked the French rear-guard, and had been badly beaten by a couple of thousand French dragoons under Latour Maubourg, who made short work of about five times their number of the Spanish infantry and cavalry.

to the position he had selected at Talavera; and on the 26th he had the two armies posted in a line extending south and north for nearly three miles from the river bank to the valley at the foot of the Sierra de Segurilla, the last spurs of the great backbone range of Central Spain. Along the front of the whole position ran a small, shallow streamlet, the Portina brook, crossed and recrossed again and again throughout the next two eventful days by the French and English contingents.

The southern part of the position was a level plain, on which stood the town of Talavera, a little decaying place, once prosperous and busy. Beyond it for nearly a mile lay a network of olive plantations, gardens, and wooded enclosures. Among these enclosures and the streets of Talavera the Spaniards took their station, and here they remained immobile, watched by Milhaud's dragoons, but otherwise ignored by the French and left contemptuously alone by their allies. Wellesley on the 28th requested Cuesta to send him some troops to reinforce his own northern flank, and the old gentleman, unexpectedly complaisant, despatched the Duke of Albuquerque with seven infantry battalions, a cavalry division, and a battery of artillery, which took post on the slopes of the Sierra and in the valley on the left of the British line, and did some very good work.

The English front touched

extended along ground which became more broken and hilly as it trended northwards. The key of the whole was a long hill, the Cerro de Medellin, on which Wellesley had planted his left wing, General Hill's Division, the 48th Foot, and four other infantry battalions, nearly 4000 bayonets in all. Behind the hill and in the valley lay Anson's and Fane's cavalry brigades, four regiments of dragoons, with Albuquerque's Spanish cavalry. In the centre and along the lower ground by the Portina brook were the five battalions of the King's German Legion under Low and Langwerth, Cameron's brigade of infantry, and Campbell's brigade, which included the 1st battalion of the 3rd Guards and the 1st battalion of the Coldstream Guards, with Kemmis's three infantry brigades on the extreme south, nearest to the Spaniards. A brigade of cavalry (Cotton's) and two brigades of infantry were held in reserve in the second line. The "morning state" of the army, two days before the fighting opened, gives a total of 20,641 of all arms.

Against this force more than double the number of French soldiers, including some of the best regiments in the service of the Emperor, were arrayed. Leaving the large Spanish army to be watched by Milhaud's horsemen and three or four regiments of infantry, Victor and Sebastiani drew up the rest of their divisions immediately facing the British.