The light dragoon Author:George Robert Gleig Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. Voyage to Lisbon—State of the City—March to the Front—Wounded Men—Camp at Elvas. There occurred very little during our passage to Lisbon of wh... more »ich it is worth while to take notice, or concerning which it may with truth be said that it differed in any respect from the ordinary adventures that attend men during the progress of sea voyages in general. We had the customary alternations of fair weather and foul, bringing with them their usual accompaniments of comfort and its opposite, the whole being summed up by a seven days' calm, off the coast of Vigo; and, as that was not the age of steam navigation, the seven days inquestion rolled but heavily away. Neither can it be said that a cruise in the jolly-boat, after an enormous log of mahogany, which with some labour we overtook, but were unable to turn to an account, gave much agreeable variety to the scene. Let me then carry my reader forward to the Tagus ; our entrance into which struck me as it does every stranger, with astonishment. I say nothing of the prodigious width of the river at its mouth; nor of the myrtle-clothed hills that greet your eye as you ascend: for it is on Lisbon itself so soon' as it rises, like a queen, out of the water, that your gaze is with irresistible interest turned. And never, surely, has the young man's hopes more cruelly differed from the realities of life, than this fair city differs, as soon as you plant your foot upon its quays, from what it appeared to be while yet looked at from a distance. As seen in the far-off horizon, Lisbon looks like a city of palaces. The dazzling whiteness of thehouses,which catch and reflect the sun's rays,—the series of terraces along which they are built, rising, in the fashion of an amphitheatre, from the river's brink,— the many spires and tow...« less