Note 30 — Chapter IX · CAMPAIGN OF 1812: BATTLE OF SALAMANCA—OCCUPATION OF MADRID—RETREAT TO SALAMANCA.

Her relations are numerous. She was in three sieges of her native city: in one her wounded brother died in her arms. She was educated in a convent, and is a lineal descendant of Ponce de Leon, the Knight of Romance, and certainly she, as a female, inherits all his heroism. Her name, Juana Maria de Los Dolores de Leon, at once gives the idea of Hidalgo consanguinity, and she is of one of the oldest of the notoriously old Spanish, not Moorish, families. After Talavera, when the Duke’s headquarters were at Badajos, and my wife was a child, Colonel Campbell and Lord Fitzroy Somerset were billeted in her sister’s house. That was in the palmy days of their affluence, when they derived a considerable income from their olive groves. These, alas! were all cut down by the unsparing hand of the French, and the sisters’ income seriously reduced. An olive tree requires great care and cultivation, nor does it bear well until twenty or thirty years old.—H.G.S.