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.