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Accordingly I left Guarda that night, and reaching Bellomonte a little after daybreak, found the vine-dresser and presented Trant’s letter.

He was on the point of starting for Sabugal, whither he had perforce to carry a dozen skins of wine, and with some little trouble I persuaded the old barber-surgeon to accompany us, bearing a petition to Marmont to be allowed peaceable possession of his shop. We arrived and were allowed to enter the town, where I assisted the vine-dresser in handling the heavy wine skins, while his brother posted off to headquarters and returned after an hour with the marshal’s protection. Armed with this, he led me off to the shop, found it undamaged, helped me to take down the shutters, showed me his cupboards, tools, and stock in trade, and answered my rudimentary questions in the art of compounding drugs–in a twitter all the while to be gone. Nor did I seek to delay him (for if my plans miscarried, Sabugal would assuredly be no place for him). Late in the afternoon he left me and went off in search of his brother, and I fell to stropping my razors with what cheerfulness I could assume.

Before nightfall my neighbours on either hand had looked in and given me good evening. They asked few questions when I told them I was taking over old Diego’s business for the time, and kept their speculations to themselves. I lay down to sleep that night with a lighter heart.

The adventure itself tickled my humour, though I had no opinion at all of the design–Trant’s design–which lay at the end of it. This, however, did not damp my zeal in using eyes and ears; and on the third afternoon, when the old vine-dresser rode over with more wine skins, and dropped in to inquire about business and take home a pint of rhubarb for the stomach-ache, I had the satisfaction of making up for him, under the eyes of two soldiers waiting to be shaved, a packet containing a compendious account of Marmont’s dispositions with a description of his headquarters. My report concluded with these words:–

“With regard to the enterprise on which I have had the honour to be consulted I offer my opinion with humility. It is, however, a fixed one. You will lose two divisions; and even a third, should you bring it.”

On the whole I had weathered through these three days with eminent success. The shaving I managed with something like credit (for a Portuguese). My pharmaceutics had been (it was vain to deny) in the highest degree empirical, but if my patients had not been cured they even more certainly had not died–or at least their bodies had not been found. What gravelled me was the phlebotomy. Somehow the chance of being called upon to let blood had not occurred to me, and on the second morning when a varicose sergeant of the line dropped into my operating chair and demanded to have a vein opened, I bitterly regretted that I had asked my employer neither where to insert the lancet nor how to stop the bleeding. I eyed the brawn in the chair, so full of animal life and rude health–no, strike at random I could not! I took his arm and asked insinuatingly, “Now, where do you usually have it done?” “Sometimes here, sometimes there,” he answered. Joy! I remembered a bottle of leeches on the shelf. I felt the man’s pulse and lifted his eyelids with trembling fingers. “In your state,” said I, “it would be a crime to bleed you. What you want is leeches.” “You think so?” he asked–“how many?” “Oh, half-a-dozen–to begin with.” In my sweating hurry I forgot (if I had ever known) that the bottle contained but three. “No,” said I, “we’ll start with a couple and work up by degrees.” He took them on his palm and turned them over with a stubby forefinger. “Funny little beasts!” said he and marched out of the shop into the sunshine. To this day when recounting his Peninsular exploits he omits his narrowest escape.