The intelligence of the revolt speedily travelled over all surrounding districts, and attracted to the spot the entire available blackguardism of the neighbourhood. The disloyal and insolvent landholders for thirty miles about called out their tenantry and retainers, and made the best of their way to Cawnpore. As when the redoubted Hebrew captain founded an asylum in the cave of Adullam, so now unto the leaders of the mutiny gathered themselves every one that was in distress, and every one that was in debt, and every one that was discontented. Thus immutable is the constitution of Oriental society:—unchanged by thirty centuries; unchangeable, perchance, by thirty more. Some chieftains brought two hundred armed followers; others four hundred. One Rajah came with a tail of forty score: while Bhowany Sing, whom Nanukchund designates as "that old and notorious scoundrel," marched into the rebel camp at the head of twelve hundred matchlock-men. No one seems to have entertained any doubt as to the final extinction of our sway. The old order of things had disappeared for ever, and it behoved any feudal leader who had ambition or necessities to be present and ready to assert himself ere the new order was definitely established. The Nana was first to seize the occasion by the forelock. A trusty adherent was sent to Bithoor with an escort of twenty horse to announce the commencement of the Mahratta rule. It was a terrible hour for the personal enemies of him who had assumed the prime authority. As soon as it became known that their master was in power, the idle ruffians who swarmed in his palace at once proceeded to gratify his spite and their own wanton cruelty. They forced the doors of Goordeen, who acted as agent to the widows of Bajee Rao, the late Peishwa; knocked down his house about his ears; slew his people; and ended by blowing him from the mouth of a cannon. They seized the attendants of Chimna Apa, who pulled the strings of the law-suit brought against the Maharaja by his cousin; loaded them with chains; and informed them that they were to be put to death as soon as the captors could find leisure to cut off their hands and noses. Nanukchund, who had been the leading counsel in the case, was warned in time of the impending danger. He sent word to his juniors to provide for their own safety, and himself sought concealment in an unfurnished house belonging to one of his friends, whence he observed the progress of the insurrection with a penetration that was occasionally distorted by present terror and the anticipation of future advancement.

On the morning of Sunday, the seventh of June, a proclamation in two languages was issued at Cawnpore from the press of a schoolmaster, and distributed by his pupils, adjuring all true Hindoos and Mussulmans to unite in defence of their religions, and rally round the person of the Nana. Neither Mussulmans nor Hindoos were slow to obey the call. The residents of the Butcher's Ward forthwith set up the green standard, and were joined by the dregs of the population. Respectable Mahomedans at first held aloof; but next day the banner was removed to an open square, south of the canal, whither a large and influential body of the faithful repaired to do homage to the symbol of their religion. Azeezun, the Demoiselle ThÉroigne of the revolt, appeared on horseback amidst a group of her admirers, dressed in the uniform of her favoured regiment, armed with pistols, and decorated with medals. A priest of high consideration seated himself beneath the flag, rosary in hand, and endeavoured by prayer and meditation to ascertain whether the day was propitious for an attack upon the stronghold of the infidel. His piety, however, was cut short by a round-shot from Lieutenant Dempster's battery, which sent the assemblage of believers scuttling to the nearest cover: upon which the holy man bundled together his beads, tucked up his robes, and made off with a precipitation not altogether consistent with the doctrine of fatalism.

Meanwhile throughout and around the town were being gathered in the gleanings of that harvest of murder. A miserable family of the name of Mackintosh was discovered lurking under a bridge disguised in native clothes, their faces stained with pitiful want of skill in imitation of the Hindoo complexion. A road overseer was caught with his wife and children to the north of the station; and another person employed in the same department, who had found a temporary refuge beneath the roof of an individual whom he had formerly obliged with a contract, was now turned adrift, and taken by the bloodhounds who were scouring the city. To each and all of these capture was death, instant inexorable. The Maharaja had despatched a party of sepoys to the residence of Mr Edward Greenway, a man of considerable property, who had given shelter to an officer recently cashiered by court-martial. This gentleman now proved that, in whatever military qualities he might have been deficient, courage, at least, was not amongst them; for he defended the threshold of his host until the last cartridge had been expended, and then walked in among the assailants, and bade them cut his throat: an invitation to which they eagerly responded. Then they secured Mr. Greenway, his wife, his sister, and his little ones, and brought them as prisoners to the Nana; who ordered them into confinement with the expectation of obtaining a ransom, and the intention of killing them whether or not the money was forthcoming. He, for one, had no notion of permitting his avarice to clash with his barbarity.

As the excitement of tracking down and unearthing Englishmen began to languish on account of the growing scarcity of victims, the mutineers gradually betook themselves to the more serious business of the siege. During the whole of Saturday Teeka Sing had been hard at work in the Arsenal, mounting the great guns, and despatching them successively to the scene of action. As fast as each piece arrived, it was placed in position, and manned by a party of volunteers. By noon on Sunday the cordon of batteries was complete, and our intrenchment was raked by twenty-four pound shot from every quarter of the compass. Now became patent to the most inexperienced eye the fatal and irremediable defects of the site which our general had selected for the fortification. The Dragoon Hospital was entirely surrounded by large and solid buildings, at distances varying from three to eight hundred yards: buildings from which the assailants derived protection at least as effectual as that afforded to the garrison by their improvised defences. From roof and window poured a shower of bullets during the hours of daylight, while after dusk troops of sepoys hovered about within pistol-shot, and made the night hideous with incessant volleys of musketry. Henceforward, there was but little sleep for our countrymen.

The annals of warfare contain no episode so painful as the story of this melancholy conflict. It is a story which needs not comment or embellishment. Whether related in the inornate language of official correspondence, or in the childish phraseology of Hindoo evidence, it moves to tears as surely as the pages in which the greatest of all historians tells, as only he can tell, the last agony of the Athenian host in Sicily. The sun never before looked on such a sight as a crowd of women and children cooped within a small space, and exposed during twenty days and nights to the concentrated fire of thousands of muskets and a score of heavy cannon. At first every projectile which struck the barracks was the signal for heartrending shrieks, and low wailing more heartrending yet: but, ere long, time and habit taught them to suffer and to fear in silence. Before the third evening every window and door had been beaten in. Next went the screens, the piled-up furniture, and the internal partitions: and soon shell and ball ranged at will through and through the naked rooms. Some ladies were slain outright by grape or round-shot. Others were struck down by bullets. Many were crushed beneath falling brickwork, or mutilated by the splinters which flew from shattered sash and panel. Happy were they whose age and sex called them to the front of the battle, and dispensed them from the spectacle of this passive carnage. Better to hear more distinctly the crackle of the sepoy musketry, and the groans of wounded wife and sister more faintly. If die they both must, such was the thought of more than one husband, it was well that duty bade them die apart.

Never did men fight with more signal determination against more fearful odds. Not at Fontenoy, not at Arcot, not at Albuera was British endurance so stubborn, or British valour so conspicuous. For, while the besiegers worked their guns under cover, the artillerymen of the besieged stood erect upon the bare plain. While the besiegers possessed unbounded store of huge mortars and battering-guns, the besieged had a few cannon too small for efficacious service in the field. While disease and the accidents of combat hourly diminished the numbers of those within, the ranks without were daily swollen by regiments of recent mutineers and fresh clans of rebels. But circumstances such as these are best adapted to exhibit the strange humour of the English warrior. With all that was most dear at their backs, and in front all that was most hateful, and, in their view, most contemptible, undaunted and not uncheerful our countrymen bore up the fray. From the very earliest days of the attack it became apparent that old Sir Hugh was unequal to the exposure and fatigue involved in the conduct of the struggle, and in the inspection and re-distribution of the posts, a labour rendered only too severe by the deadly fire of the enemy. In such a strait men act as acted those ten thousand Greeks, whose memory will never fade, when by the banks of far Euphrates their chief had been slain and their allies scattered to the winds. "Then," says Xenophon, "Clearchus took the command, and the rest obeyed; not as having chosen him by formal election, but because they saw that he, and he alone, had the temper of a general." The Clearchus of Cawnpore was Captain Moore, an officer in charge of the invalids of the thirty-second foot. He was a tall, fair, blue-eyed man, glowing with animation and easy Irish intrepidity. Wheresoever there was most pressing risk, and wheresoever there was direst wretchedness, his presence was seldom long wanting. Under the rampart; at the batteries; in some out-picket, where men were dropping like pheasants under a fearful cross-fire; in some corner of the hospital, to a brave heart more fearful still, where lay the mangled forms of those young and delicate beings whom war should always spare:—ever and everywhere was heard his sprightly voice speaking words of encouragement, of exhortation, of sympathy, and even of courteous gallantry. Wherever Moore had passed he left men something more courageous, and women something less unhappy. It is well when such leaders are at hand. It is ill when they are discovered and promoted too late to undo the evil that has been already done.

Across the south-western angle of the intrenchment ran a line of barracks which were still in course of erection. They each measured some two hundred feet in length, and were constructed of red brick, which had not as yet received that coat of white plaster that reduces all Anglo-Indian house decoration to a uniformity of colour diversified only by the various degrees of age and shabbiness. Of these, the buildings marked in the plan by the numbers 2, 3, and 4 were in close proximity to the corner of our fortification, the entire extent of which they commanded, inasmuch as their walls had been already completed to an elevation of forty feet. None of the others had been raised to a height of more than two or three yards from the level of the ground. The floors had not been laid, nor the bamboo poles removed, which, rudely spliced together, form the cheap but frail scaffolding of Hindoo architecture: and the ground both within and without, along the whole row, was thickly covered with piles of the materials used in the progress of the works. From the very first the sepoys possessed the northern half of the range: but they never succeeded in obtaining a hold on Barrack Number Four, which was defended by a party of civil engineers, who had been employed upon the East Indian railroad. These gentlemen, over and above that indigenous aptitude for conflict common to all Englishmen of the upper classes, had acquired, during years spent in surveying, a trained sharpness of vision and a correct judgment of distance which rendered them peculiarly dangerous when placed behind the sights of an Enfield rifle. For three days these amateurs baffled every attempt of the enemy: but at the end of that period the assaults became so fierce and frequent that they were not sorry to accept the services of a fighting man by profession. And so there came across to them from the redan Captain Jenkins, a valiant soldier, foredoomed to a death of anguish extraordinary even at such a time.

Whether the mutineers were aware of this introduction of the military element, or whether they already had learned to respect civilian skill and bravery, from this time forth they desisted from their efforts in that quarter, and turned their attention to the southernmost of the unfinished erections, which they proceeded to occupy in great force. Hereupon Lieutenant Glanville was posted with a small detachment in the adjoining barrack, which thenceforward was recognised by both parties as the key of our position. What the farm of Hougoumont was at Waterloo,—what the sand-bag battery was at Inkerman,—that was Barrack Number Two in the death-wrestle of Cawnpore. How furious was the strife,—how desperate the case of the little garrison, may be gathered from the fact that, though only sixteen in number, they had a surgeon to themselves, who never lacked ample employment. Glanville came under his hands, desperately wounded: and the vacancy thus caused was soon after supplied by Lieutenant Mowbray Thomson of the Fifty-sixth Native Infantry. This officer did his best to lose a life which destiny seemed determined to preserve in order that England might know how, in their exceeding distress, her sons had not been unmindful of her ancient honour. "My sixteen men," he writes, "consisted in the first instance of Ensign Henderson of the Fifty-sixth Native Infantry, five or six of the Madras fusileers, two plate-layers from the railway works, and some men of the Eighty-fourth Regiment. The first instalment was soon disabled. The Madras fusileers were armed with the Enfield rifle, and consequently they had to bear the brunt of the attack. They were all shot at their posts. Several of the Eighty-fourth also fell: but, in consequence of the importance of the position, as soon as a loss in my little corps was reported, Captain Moore sent us over a reinforcement from the intrenchment. Sometimes a civilian, sometimes a soldier came. The orders given us were, not to surrender with our lives, and we did our best to obey them."

Nothing contributed so much to check the spread of the rebellion of 1857 as the individual courage and pugnacity of our countrymen resident in the East. Civil and military alike, they were all skilled in the use of weapons, and cool in the presence of personal danger. Such a habit of body and mind they acquired both for policy and for pleasure. Every Anglo-Indian is well aware that he is one of an imperial race, holding its own in the midst of a subject population by dint of foresight and martial prowess. There were villages of evil reputation which on the day of assessment the collector preferred to visit on the back of the steadiest Arab in his stables, with a favourite hog spear carelessly balanced beside his right stirrup. There were notorious bits of road where the traveller felt more comfortable if he heard from time to time the lock of his revolver clanking against the soda-water bottles in the pocket of his palanquin. Never was there a better training-school for warfare than the Indian hunting-field. A man who has heard unmoved above his head the scream of a crippled elephant;—who behind his trusty Westley Richards has awaited, calm and collected, the last rush of a wounded tiger;—need not doubt what his behaviour may be in any possible emergency. He who, like more than one true sportsman, has hardly crawled away, bloody knife in hand, from the embrace of a dying bear:—who has kept at bay a forty-inch boar with the butt of his shivered lance;—will not be at a loss how to meet the charge of a mutinous trooper. The rebels found to their cost that the Sahibs, like old stalkers of large game, were seldom foolhardy and never remiss:—that they were neither fluttered by peril nor over-excited by success:—that they rarely failed to make the most of what cover they could get, and still more rarely wasted a cartridge. Lieutenant Thomson contrived a sort of perch half-way up the wall of his barrack, in which he stationed a young officer, named Stirling, of high repute as a marksman, who soon proved that a rebel running home to his dinner was at least as easy to hit as an ibex bounding down the crags in a Himalayan valley, or a blue cow dodging in and out amidst the trunks of an Oude forest.

The whole of this range of buildings not included within our posts was literally alive with sepoys. They could distinctly be heard scampering along in troops, like rats behind an antique wainscot, chattering, yelling, or screaming under the emotion of the moment. From door, and window, and drain, and loophole they fired away at our stronghold, accompanying each shot with a taunt, conveying, in Oriental fashion, a random but painful statement concerning a remote ancestress of the person addressed. Ever and anon a fanatic, inspired by some vile drug, would issue forth into the open, brandishing his sword, in order to indulge himself in a dance of defiance; on all which occasions Lieutenant Stirling took good care that the performance should not meet with an encore. When the enemy became more than usually troublesome, the picket which was most hardly pressed would invite their neighbours to come over and assist them: and then the combined force of some thirty bayonets sallied forth to sweep the line of barracks, chasing the foe before them; killing the boldest and slowest of foot; knocking on the head such as were drunk or asleep; shooting down those who, in their anxiety to get a good aim, had ensconced themselves too high up to be able to climb down on so short a notice; and driving the rest out, and across the plain: at which point the gunners of the intrenchment took up the work, and plied the flying multitude with grape and canister. During one of the earliest of these sorties eleven mutineers were captured, and brought into the intrenchment. As no sentry could just then be spared from the front, they were placed under the charge of Bridget Widdowson, a stalwart dame, wife of a private of the Thirty-second Regiment. Secured by the very insufficient contrivance of a single rope, passed from wrist to wrist, they sat quietly on the ground like good school-children, while the matron walked up and down in front of the row, drawn sword in hand. After she had been relieved by a warder of the other sex, they all managed to slip off: and from that time forward it was generally understood that prisoners were to be left on the spot where they had been caught, with the jackal and the vulture as their jailers. A captive, as long as he remained in custody, was a consumer of precious food; and at once became the most dangerous of spies, if he succeeded in making his escape to the rebel lines with a report of our destitute condition.

On Friday, the twelfth, the insurgents made their first general assault upon our position. The cavalry, who on that day had been the first in the career of sedition, were now with some difficulty prevailed upon to dismount and lead the way to glory; but after the loss of two of their number they concluded that enough had been done to sustain the credit of their branch of the service, and retired to console themselves for their repulse in the opium shops of the suburbs. The sepoy infantry next advanced to try their fortune, followed by all the rabble of the bazaars. They came on like men, but they went where there were men likewise. It was not thus that our rampart might be won. Every English soldier had ready to his hand from three to ten muskets loaded with ball and slug: for there was a plentiful stock of small-arms within the fortification. The civilian held his thumb pressed tight upon the hammer of a pet smoothbore, with a charge of Number Four shot for close quarters snugly packed in the left-hand barrel. The officer in command of the battery was feeling for the leaden tip in each chamber of his revolver, as he gave his final order to take time and aim below the cross-belts. Our people were composed and confident. Sending quiet shots from behind a wall into the middle of a crowd was child's play compared with the daylong hazard of the crashing cannonade. After a short but bitter engagement the assailants withdrew, leaving on the field many of their comrades. Profiting by this harsh lesson they returned henceforward to their old tactics, and applied themselves to pound out the life of our garrison by an unremitting storm of ball, and bomb, and bullet.

Few, and ever fewer, in number; overmatched in weight of metal; ill-provided with ammunition, and protected by not an inch of cover, our artillerymen still sustained the hot debate. Lieutenant Ashe went through his work with a display of professional interest that would not have disgraced Sir William Armstrong during a trial match at Shoeburyness. After each round the besiegers saw with astonishment the zealous young Sahib leap on the heel of the discharged gun, spy-glass in hand, heedless of the missiles which were chirping round his ears. Unfortunately eight out of our ten pieces were nine-pounders, and the supply of nine-pound balls was soon expended. Reduced to load with shot a size too small, our officers could not secure accuracy in their practice. The gunners in our south-eastern battery had suffered much from a small piece which the sepoys had contrived to hoist into position amidst the dÉbris of one among the half-built barracks. Lieutenant Delafosse, after despatching a number of six-pound balls in the direction of the embrasure without any perceptible result, at length resolved to bring the matter to a conclusion in one way or another. He rammed down three cannon-balls, filled up the chinks with grape, bade his men stand back, and fired off this portentous charge. To his surprise and delight his own gun did not burst, and nothing more was ever heard of the tiresome little antagonist. The same officer, somewhat later in the siege, was in the north-eastern battery when the carriage of a cannon was ignited by an unlucky accident. The situation was most critical, for the woodwork, which had stood beneath the June sun until it was dry as tinder, blazed furiously, and there was imminent risk of a general explosion of all the powder in the battery. The rebels discerned the opportunity, and concentrated their fire upon the spot where Delafosse, stretched at length on his back beneath the gun, was pulling down the burning splinters and scattering earth upon the flames. By the aid of two private soldiers he extinguished the conflagration, though eighteen pound and twenty-four pound shot were flying past at the rate of six a minute. With such examples before them, people of no class or calling were behindhand in acts of daring when the common safety was at stake. One Jacobi, a coachmaker by trade, and, to judge from his appellation, a person of mixed parentage, descried on the roof of the magazine a fire-ball, which he mistook for a live shell. Under this impression he clambered up, secured the object of his apprehension, and heaved it over the breastwork with a sigh of relief. There was many a Cross of Victoria earned in that camp, where victory was not, nor any reasonable chance of victory.

But the contest was too unequal to last long. By the end of the first week our fifty-nine artillerymen had all been killed or wounded at their posts. Of the officers to whom the charge of the guns had originally been entrusted, few had escaped unhurt from the hail of lead and iron, or the hardly less deadly rays of the Indian noon. Sunstroke had killed Major Prout. Captain Kempland was stretched on the floor of the barrack, dazed and powerless. His next in command, Lieutenant Eckford, a soldier of high promise and an accomplished gentleman, while snatching half an hour's repose under the roof of the verandah, was struck full on the heart by a cannon-ball. In the west quarter Dempster had been shot dead, and from the same battery Martin had been carried into the hospital with a bullet in his lungs. For a while volunteers endeavoured to supply the place of the trained gunners; and all was done that could be expected from bandsmen, and opium agents, and telegraph clerks firing six-pound balls out of damaged nine-pounders, while exposed without protection to a murderous discharge from siege guns and heavy mortars. There could be only one termination to such a business. Our only howitzer was knocked clean off its carriage. One cannon lost the entire muzzle. Some had their sides beaten in, some their vents blown out. At length our park of artillery was reduced to a couple of pieces, which were withdrawn under cover, loaded with grape, and reserved for the purpose of repelling an assault. And even of these the bore had been injured to such an extent that the canister could not be driven home. Our poor ladies, accordingly, in rivalry of those somewhat apocryphal Carthaginian dames who twisted their hair into bowstrings, gave up their stockings to supply the case for a novel but not unserviceable cartridge. Since the days when the shopmen of Londonderry loaded their quaint old ordnance with brick-bats wrapped in strips of gutter-piping, necessity has, perhaps, never been brought to bed with a more singular offspring.

As our reply waned more faint and ever fainter, the fire of the enemy continued to augment in volume, in rapidity, and in precision. The list of individual casualties mounted up in increasing ratio, and before long our misfortunes culminated in a wholesale disaster. Grave fears had been entertained for the security of the thatched barrack by every man who had the common sense to see that fire would burn straw. There were found some who, with admirable self-devotion, had scrambled on to that lead-bespattered slope, and essayed to cover with tiles and rubbish the inflammable material of the roof. On the eighth evening of the bombardment a lighted carcase settled among the rafters, and the whole building was speedily in a blaze. It happened most unfortunately that this barrack, as affording the better shelter and the less confined space, had been selected for the accommodation of our wounded and our sick. No effort was spared, no hazard shunned to rescue those who could not help themselves: but in spite of everything which could be tried two brave men perished a little sooner than their fellows, and by a rather more distressing fate. That was indeed a night of horror. The roar of the flames, lost every ten seconds in the peal of the rebel artillery; the whistle of the great shot; the shrieks of the sufferers, who forgot their pain in the helpless anticipation of a sudden and agonizing death; the groups of crying women and children huddled together in the ditch; the stream of men running to and fro between the houses, laden with sacks of provisions, and kegs of ammunition, and private property of value, and living burdens more precious still; the guards crouching silent and watchful, finger on trigger, each at his station along the external wall; the forms of countless foes, revealed now and again by the fitful glare, prowling around through the outer gloom;—these sights and sounds combined to form a scene and a chorus which will be ever memorable to the trio of actors who lived through the catastrophe of that awful drama.

Captain Moore thought it well to give the enemy an early and convincing proof that the spirit of our people was not broken by this great calamity. At the dead of the ensuing night he stole out from the intrenchment with fifty picked men at his heels in the direction of the chapel and the racket-court. Beginning from this point, the party hurried down the rebel lines under favour of the darkness, doing whatever rapid mischief was practicable. They surprised in untimely slumber some native gunners, who never waked again; spiked and rolled over several twenty-four pounders; gratified their feelings by blowing up a piece which had given them especial annoyance; and got back, carrying in their arms four of their number, and leaving another behind:—a service brilliant indeed, but barren of results: for the sepoys had only to resolve on the calibre that they preferred, and the number of canon which they could conveniently work, and then take at will from the arsenal so inconsiderately placed at their disposal. This chivalrous act, one among many such, at that time passed without reward or public approval. When in a water-logged vessel men are toiling for their lives, who observes whether his neighbour does more or less at the pumps than he, provided all do their utmost? And when they have betaken themselves to the boats, and are rowing against time and famine, who cares which of the crew feathers most neatly, and which reaches forward with the straightest back? This was no set duel of civilized nations: no stately tournament, wherein the champions fight beneath the eyes of a friendly people, ready with their praise and sympathy; where wounds are bandaged with a ribbon, and self-sacrifice entitles the hero to a corner in our modern Walhalla, the columns of the daily press. Rare were those who here had leisure or heart to take note, and they who survived to make report were rarer still. As during the ages before Atrides came on earth countless chieftains, unwept, unknown, sank into eternal oblivion because they lacked a sacred bard: so at Cawnpore many a soldier brave as Hodson of Hodson's Horse, nobly prodigal of himself as William Peel of the Shannon, dared, and fell, and was forgotten for want of a special correspondent. Correspondence there was, containing much earnest entreaty for a rescue and some unconscious eloquence; but too important matter had to be compressed into too small a compass to admit of panegyric or recommendation for honours and advancement. Several urgent missives found their way to Lucknow, rolled tightly into quills, sealed up, and hidden with mysterious art in and about the person of Hindoo messengers;—so curiously stowed away that in some cases it took almost as long to produce as to convey the note: though, if the rebels chanced to intercept the despatch, they generally abridged the operation by cutting in pieces the ill-starred courier. On the middle day of June the Lucknow surgeons extracted the following lines from the nose or ear of a native who had been fortunate and adroit enough to elude the manifold perils which beset those forty miles of road:—

"From Sir H. M. Wheeler, K.C.B. to Martin Gubbins, Esq.

"My dear Gubbins,

"We have been besieged since the sixth by the Nana Sahib, joined by the whole of the native troops, who broke out on the morning of the fourth. The enemy have two 24-pounders, and several other guns. We have only eight 9-pounders. The whole Christian population is with us in a temporary intrenchment, and our defence has been noble and wonderful, our loss heavy and cruel. We want aid, aid, aid! Regards to Lawrence.

"Yours, &c.
H. M. Wheeler.
"14th June.
Quarter-past 8, P.M.

"P.S.—If we had 200 men we could punish the scoundrels and aid you."

The nature of the reply may be gathered from an acknowledgment which it elicited from Captain Moore. The anniversary seems to have inspired his pen. Brief and manly, cheerful and yet thoughtful, it is such a letter as an English officer should write on the eighteenth of June.

"From Captain Moore, H.M. 32d Foot.
18th June, 10, P.M.

"Sir,

"By desire of Sir Hugh Wheeler, I have the honour to acknowledge your letter of the 16th.

"Sir Hugh regrets you cannot send him the 200 men, as he believes with their assistance we could drive the insurgents from Cawnpore, and capture their guns.

"Our troops, officers, and volunteers have acted most nobly, and on several occasions a handful of men have driven hundreds before them. Our loss has been chiefly from the sun, and their heavy guns. Our rations will last a fortnight, and we are still well supplied with ammunition. Our guns are serviceable. Report says that troops are advancing from Allahabad, and any assistance might save our garrison. We, of course, are prepared to hold out to the last. It is needless to mention the names of those who have been killed, or died. We trust in God, and if our exertions here assist your safety, it will be a consolation to know that our friends appreciate our devotion. Any news of relief will cheer us.

"Yours, &c.
"J. Moore, Captain,
"32d Regiment.
"By order."

And now commenced to our brethren and sisters a period of unspeakable woe; the ante-chamber of ruin; the penultimate syllable of their dismal story. After the destruction of the thatched barrack, dearth of house-room forced two hundred of our women and children to spend twelve days of twice twelve hours without ceiling over head or flooring under foot. At night they lay on the bare ground, exposed to every noxious influence and exhalation that was abroad in the air; and in the morning they rose, those among them who rose at all, to endure, bareheaded often, and always roofless, the blazing fury of the tropical beams. The men off guard attempted to contrive for them a partial protection, by stretching canvas screens across a framework of muskets and poles; but these canopies were soon fired by the rebel shells, and the poor creatures were reduced to cower beneath the shelter of our earthwork, feebly chasing the shadow thrown by the sun as he rose and set. It is impossible for a home-staying Englishman to realize the true character of the great troubles in 1857, unless he constantly bears in mind that all which he reads was devised, and done, and endured beneath the vertical rays of an Eastern summer, and in a temperature varying from a hundred and twenty to a hundred and thirty-eight degrees in the shade. If there are any whose experience of heat is limited to a field-day at Wimbledon in the month of August, or to a tramp over Norfolk stubbles when the dogs are too thirsty to work, and the boy has carried off the beer to the wrong spinney, they will obtain a more just notion from a sad tale simply told than from pages of unscientific rhetoric.

This is what befell Mrs. M——, the wife of the surgeon at a certain station on the southern confines of the insurrection. "I heard," she says, "a number of shots fired, and, looking out, I saw my husband driving furiously from the mess-house, waving his wip. I ran to him, and, seeing a bearer with my child in his arms, I caught her up, and got into the buggy. At the mess-house we found all the officers assembled, together with sixty sepoys, who had remained faithful. We went off in one large party, amidst a general conflagration of our late homes. We reached the caravanserai at Chattapore the next morning, and thence started for Callinger. At this point our sepoy escort deserted us. We were fired upon by matchlock-men, and one officer was shot dead. We heard, likewise, that the people had risen at Callinger, so we returned, and walked back ten miles that day. M—— and I carried the child alternately. Presently Mrs. Smalley died of sunstroke. We had no food amongst us. An officer kindly lent us a horse. We were very faint. The major died, and was buried; also the serjeant-major, and some women. The bandsmen left us on the nineteenth of June. We were fired at again by matchlock-men, and changed direction for Allahabad. Our party consisted of nine gentlemen, two children, the serjeant, and his wife. On the morning of the twentieth, Captain Scott took Lottie on to his horse. I was riding behind my husband, and she was so crushed between us. She was two years old on the first of the month. We were both weak through want of food and the effect of the sun. Lottie and I had no head-covering. M—— had a sepoy's cap I found on the ground. Soon after sunrise we were followed by villagers armed with clubs and spears. One of them struck Captain Scott's horse on the leg. He galloped off with Lottie, and my poor husband never saw his child again. We rode on several miles, keeping away from villages, and then crossed the river. Our thirst was extreme. M—— had dreadful cramps, so that I had to hold him on the horse. I was very uneasy about him. The day before I saw the drummer's wife eating chupatties, and asked her to give a piece to the child, which she did. I now saw water in a ravine. The descent was steep and our only drinking-vessel was M——'s cap. Our horse got water, and I bathed my neck. I had no stockings, and my feet were torn and blistered. Two peasant's came in sight, and we were frightened, and rode off. The serjeant held our horse, and M—— put me up and mounted. I think he must have got suddenly faint, for I fell, and he over me, on the road, when the horse started off. Some time before he said, and Barber, too, that he could not live many hours. I felt he was dying before we came to the ravine. He told me his wishes about his children and myself, and took leave. My brain seemed burnt up. No tears came. As soon as we fell, the serjeant let go the horse, and it went off; so, that escape was cut off. We sat down on the ground waiting for death. Poor fellow! he was very weak; his thirst was frightful, and I went to get him water. Some villagers came, and took my rupees and watch. I took off my wedding-ring, and twisted it in my hair, and replaced the guard. I tore off the skirt of my dress to bring water in, but it was no use, for when I returned, my beloved's eyes were fixed, and, though I called, and tried to restore him, and poured water into his mouth, it only rattled in his throat. He never spoke to me again. I held him in my arms till he sank gradually down. I felt frantic, but could not cry. I was alone. I bound his head and face in my dress, for there was no earth to bury him. The pain in my hands and feet was dreadful. I went down to the ravine, and sat in the water on a stone, hoping to get off at night, and look for Lottie. When I came back from the water, I saw that they had not taken her little watch, chain, and seals, so I tied them under my petticoat. In an hour, about thirty villagers came. They dragged me out of the ravine, and took off my jacket, and found the little chain. They then dragged me to a village, mocking me all the way, and wondering whom I was to belong to. The whole population came to look at me. I asked for a bedstead, and lay down outside the door of a hut. They had dozens of cows, and yet refused me milk. When night came, and the village was quiet, some old woman brought me a leaf-full of rice. I was too parched to eat, and they gave me water. The morning after, a neighbouring Rajah sent a palanquin and a horseman to fetch me, who told me that a little child and three sahibs had come to his master's house." And so the mother found her lost one, "greatly blistered," poor little darling. It is not for Europeans in India to pray that their flight be not in the winter.

These women had spent their girlhood in the pleasant watering-places and country homes of our island, surrounded by all of English comfort and refinement that Eastern wealth could buy. Their later years had slipped away amidst the secure plenty and languid ease of an European household in India. In spacious saloons, alive with swinging punkahs; where closed and darkened windows excluded the heated atmosphere, and produced a counterfeit night, while through a mat of wetted grass poured a stream of artificial air; with piles of ice, and troops of servants, and the magazines of the preceding month, and the sensation novels of the preceding season, monotonous, but not ungrateful, the even days flew by. Early married life has in Bengal peculiar charms. Settled down in some out-station, with no society save that of a casual road-surveyor or a distant planter, the world forgetting, and by the world remembered only at such times as there is talk concerning the chances of official promotion, the young pair have full leisure and a fair plea for indulging in that delicious habit of mutual selfishness which changes existence into a perpetual honeymoon, until that sorrowful epoch, when the children are too old to be kept any longer in the enervating climate of Hindostan; when the period arrives for writing to mothers-in-law, and sisters, and London bankers, and Brighton schoolmasters; when even the pale pet of four years old, who still answers to the name of baby, must go home at the beginning of next cold season, and ought to have gone before the end of last. Then begin the troubles of an Anglo-Indian family.

But though such ladies are often destined to endure the wearing anxiety of an unnatural separation, they never know what it is to experience a moment of physical privation. The services of menials, who make up by their number and obsequiousness what they lack in energy,—the unwearied attention of an affectionate partner and friend shield them from distress and excuse them from exertion. To have slept four in a cabin on board an outward-bound steamer,—to have passed a night in a palanquin, or a day at a posting-house where there was no tea, and only milk enough for the little ones;—had hitherto appeared to the Cawnpore ladies the last conceivable extremity of destitution and discomfort. Now, the Red Sea in July would have been to them an Elysium, and a luncheon on Peninsular and Oriental ale and cheese a priceless banquet. By a sudden turn of fortune they had been placed beneath the heel of those beings whom they had ever regarded with that unconscious aversion and contempt of race which is never so intense as in a female breast. Those who were to them most dear and trusted were absent from their side, save when a not unkindly bullet released the husband from his post, and restored him to the wife, if but to die. Accustomed to those frequent ablutions which, in England at least a duty, are in India a necessity, they had not a single spongeful of water for washing from the commencement to the close of the siege. They who, from childhood upwards, in the comprehensive and pretty phrase which ladies love, "had had everything nice about them," were now herded together in fetid misery, where delicacy and modesty were hourly shocked, though never for a moment impaired. Unshod, unkempt, ragged and squalid, haggard and emaciated, parched with drought and faint with hunger, they sat waiting to hear that they were widows. Each morning deepened the hollow in the youngest cheek, and added a new furrow to the fairest brow. Want, exposure, and depression, speedily decimated that hapless company. In those regions, a hideous train of diseases stand always within call: fever, and apoplexy, and the fell scourge of cholera, and dysentery, plague more ghastly still. It was of fever that Miss Brightman died, worn out with nursing a boy who had been shot through his first red coat. Sir George Parker, the cantonment magistrate, complained of sickness and headache, accompanied by a sensation of drowsiness and oppression, which gradually deepened into insensibility, and thence into death. Such, too, was the fate of Colonel Williams of the Fifty-sixth Native Infantry, and of the Rev. Joseph Rooney, the Catholic priest, in spite of the devoted care of the Irish soldiery. The horrors which all shared and witnessed overset the balance of more than one highly-wrought organization. A missionary of the Propagation Society, as each day drew in, would bring his aged mother into the verandah for a breath of the evening. At length a musket-ball, shot, we may hope, at a venture, struck down the poor old lady with a painful wound. Her sufferings affected the reason of her son, and he died a raving maniac. Woe was it in those days unto them that were with child. There were infants born during the terrible three weeks;—infants who had no future. There were women who underwent more than all the anguish of maternity, with less than none of the hope and joy. The medical stores had all been destroyed in the conflagration. There remained no drugs, and cordials, and opiates; no surgical instruments and appliances to cure, to alleviate, or to deaden. Perhaps it was as well that the absence of saws and tourniquets rendered impracticable the more critical operations: for here, as at Lucknow, it was found that, during the months of an Indian summer, within the circuit of a beleagured fortification the consequences of amputation were invariably fatal. Science could not regret that she was powerless, when her most successful effort would hardly have prolonged an agony.

But, besides the Nana, another foe, ruthless and pertinacious as he, had broken ground in front of our bulwarks. If our people had eaten as freely as they had fought, their provisions would have been consumed within the ten days: and human abstinence and endurance could not eke out the slender stock beyond the limit of some three weeks. Already the tins of preserved meats were empty, and the meal had fallen low in the casks; and many barrels had been tapped by the enemy's shot, and the rest were ominously light. The store of luxuries contributed from the regimental mess-rooms had been shared by all ranks alike. A noble equality and fraternity reigned through the little republic.

During that year our countrymen in India often debated, in a spirit by no means of idle speculation, whether a member of a blockaded force had a right to reserve food and drink for the exclusive support of himself, his family, and his intimate associates. That period was fruitful in questions of novel and momentous sophistry: questions to be found in no closet compilation of Ethics and Dialectics. Would a man be justified in shooting his wife if it was evident that she would otherwise fall alive into the power of the mutineers? Would a European flying for his life be guilty of murder if he blew out the brains of an innocent villager who had unwittingly viewed him as he broke cover, and who might therefore give information to the pursuers of blood? Morally guilty, that is to say: for it is difficult to conceive the circumstances under which a European would have been found legally guilty of the murder of a native during the year 1857. Might a colonel call out his men, and then mow them down with grape if it was certain that the regiment was on the eve of a revolt? Might he if it was almost certain? If it was most likely? If it was barely possible? These points were raised and determined off hand by stern casuists, who, with a thrust or a shot, broke off the horns of a dilemma which would have sorely tried the subtlety of a Whately.

Theories differed as to the lawfulness of a private store in time of siege: but the defenders of Cawnpore were right in their practice. For in the last extremity of war his own life is not more important to an individual than the life of his neighbour. A community of warriors striving by a fair and equitable division to extract from their hoard of victual all the collective material of strength and valour which it may contain, presents surely an aspect more philosophical, as well as more elevated, than an association of selfish and suspicious men, comrades only in name, resembling nothing so much as jurymen vying to starve each other out by help of concentrated meat lozenges. During the first few days the private soldiers fared sparingly, but, for them, poor fellows, delicately enough. "Here might be seen one," says Captain Thomson, "trudging away from the main-guard laden with a bottle of champagne, a tin of preserved herrings, and a pot of jam for his mess allowance. There would be another with salmon, rum, and sweetmeats for his inheritance." But very soon the dainties came to an end, and the allowance was scantier than ever. It was a favourite saying among the generation of military men, who in Europe kept unwilling holiday between the day of Waterloo and the day of Alma, that an Englishman fights best when he is full, and an Irishman when he is drunk. And yet nowhere in the chronicles of our army does there exist the record of doughtier deeds than were done in the June of '57 by Englishmen whose daily sustenance was a short gill of flour, and a short handful of split peas; by Irishmen who had no stimulant save their own bravery and a rare sip of putrid water.

Numerous attempts were made by friends without to mend the fare of the garrison, which were for the most part defeated by the vigilance of the sepoys. A baker of the town, who had been footman in an Anglo-Indian family, was detected smuggling a basket of bread into the intrenchment. The culprit perhaps fondly imagined that Azimoolah would have had mercy upon him in consideration of their common antecedents; but, if he entertained such an expectation, he was doomed to disappointment. Much credit is due to Zuhooree, an official in the Department of Abkaree, a mysterious branch of the Revenue, the periodical occurrence of which in the Indian budget has vexed the souls of a succession of English financiers. This person put himself into communication with Major Larkins of the Artillery, and sent into the fortification, as opportunity served, most acceptable parcels of bread and eggs, with occasional bottles of milk and liquid butter. At length, on the night of the fourteenth of June, fifteen of his emissaries, among whom were two women, were caught as they endeavoured to glide through the cordon of sentries under cover of the flurry and consternation of our sortie. They were all blown from guns, but not before the captors had elicited from them the name of their employer. It was high time for Zuhooree to look to his safety. Already his family had been imprisoned and maltreated on an unfounded charge of Christianity, and the rebel camp was a dangerous stage on which to play the part of good Obadiah. He accordingly left by stealth for Allahabad, bearing with him a letter of commendation from Major Larkins, attested by a gold ring set with five diamonds, which belonged to the wife of that officer.

Our people did what they could to help themselves. A fat bull, sacred to Brahma, finding nothing to eat in the streets, inasmuch as the corn-dealers had closed their booths for fear of the sepoys, came grazing along the plain until he arrived within range of our profane rifles. To shoot down this pampered monster, the fakeer of the animal world,[2] was no considerable feat for marksmen who could hit a black buck running at a distance of a hundred and fifty paces. The difficulty consisted in the retrieving of the game, which lay full three hundred yards from our rampart, on a plain swept by the fire of the insurgents. Inside our place, however, courage was more plentiful than beef; and eight or ten volunteers professed themselves ready to follow Captain Moore, who was first at any feast which partook of the nature of a fray. The party provided themselves with a stout rope, which they fastened round the legs and horns of the beast, and dragged home their prize amidst a storm of cheers and bullets, alive but not unscathed.

In the banquet which ensued the defenders of the outposts had no part. On the other hand, they sometimes enjoyed luxuries of their own. A pariah dog, seduced by blandishments never before lavished upon one of his despised race, was tempted within the walls and thence into the camp-kettle of Barrack Number Two. Towards that building, as towards the lion's den in the fable, pointed the footsteps of every kind of quadruped, and from it none. An aged horse, whose younger days had been spent in the ranks of the Irregular Cavalry, was killed, roasted, and eaten up in two meals by the combined pickets. The head was converted into soup, and sent into the intrenchment for the use of some favoured ladies; no explanations being offered or demanded concerning the nature of the stock. Captain Halliday, of the Fifty-ninth Native Infantry, who had come across on a morning visit, begged a portion for his poor wife, who was lying in the hospital, sick unto death of the small-pox. On his way back, walking, it may be, too slowly for security through dread of spilling one precious drop, he fell never to rise again. In the midst of every action and every movement, during the hours of labour and the minutes of refreshment, unlooked for and unavoidable the mortal stroke descended.

For by day and night the fire never ceased. The round shot crashed and spun through the windows, raked the earthwork, and skipped about the open ground in every corner of our position. The bullets cut the air, and pattered on the wall like hail. The great shells rolled hissing along the floors and down the trenches, and, bursting, spread around them a circle of wrack, and mutilation, and promiscuous destruction. In their blind and merciless career those iron messengers spared neither old nor young, nor combatants nor sufferers, but flew ever onwards, inflicting superfluous wounds and unavailing destruction. A single bomb killed or maimed seven married women, who were seated in the ditch; killed Jacobi, a watchmaker, namesake of the intrepid coachwright; killed too the cashiered officer whose drunken freak had done something to accelerate the outbreak. There were those who endured in one day a double or a treble bereavement; while in some families none remained to mourn. Colonel Williams died of apoplexy, and his wife, disfigured and tortured by a frightful hurt in the face, would fain have rejoined her husband. On the fifteenth of June Miss Mary Williams was stunned by a fall of the ceiling, and expired in the arms of a wounded sister, unconscious of her loving care. Two daughters survived—for a while. Mistress White was walking with a twin child at either shoulder, and her good man, a private of the Thirty-second, by her side. The same ball slew the father, broke both elbows of the mother, and severely injured one of the orphans. Captain Reynolds lost an arm and his life by a cannon-shot; and Mrs. Reynolds, whose wrist had been pierced by a musket ball, sank under fever and sorrow. A half-caste tradesman and his daughter, crouching behind an empty barrel, too late and together discovered that their shelter was inadequate. A son of Sir Hugh was reclining on a sofa, faint with recent loss of blood;—one sister at his feet, and another, with both his parents, busied about his wants in different parts of the room;—when an uninvited and a fatal guest entered the doorway, and left the lad a headless corpse. No less than three subalterns attached to the same regiment as young Wheeler lost their heads within the redan. Lieutenant Jervis of the Engineers was walking to his battery through a shower of lead, with a gait of calm grandeur, as if he were pacing the Eden Garden beneath the eye-glasses of Calcutta beauty. In vain his comrades raised their wonted shout of "Run, Jervis! Run!" He never returned to head-quarters. He never reached his post. A grape-shot passed through the body of Mr. Heberden, as he was handing some water to a lady. This gentleman, the most undaunted and unaffected of the brave and simple men of science employed upon the East Indian railroad, lay on his face for a whole week without a murmur or a sigh, but not, we may well believe, without a tacit prayer for the relief which came at last. Mr. Hillersdon, the magistrate of the station, was dashed in pieces by a twenty-four pound ball, while talking in the verandah to his wife, weak from an unseasonable confinement. A few days elapsed, and a shot, less cruel than some, displaced an avalanche of bricks which put an end to her short widowhood. But poverty of language does not permit to continue the list of horrors. In such a catalogue the synonyms of death are soon exhausted, and give place to a grim tautology.

"The frequency of our casualties," writes Captain Thomson, "may be understood by the history of one hour. Lieutenant Prole had come to the main-guard to see Armstrong, the adjutant of the Fifty-third Native Infantry, who was unwell. While engaged in conversation with the invalid, Prole was struck by a musket-ball in the thigh, and fell to the ground. I put his arm upon my shoulder, and holding him round the waist, endeavoured to hobble across the open to the barrack, in order that he might obtain the attention of the surgeons there. While thus employed a ball hit me under the right shoulder-blade, and we fell to the ground together, and were picked up by some privates, who dragged us both back to the main-guard. While I was lying on the ground, wofully sick from the wound, Gilbert Bax, of the Forty-eighth Native Infantry, came to condole with me, when a bullet pierced his shoulder-blade, causing a wound from which he died before the termination of the siege."

The youngest were the least to be pitied. In such a plight, ignorance of happier days was indeed bliss:—ignorance that there was a fair world without, where people laughed merrily, and slept soundly, and lived in the anticipations of enjoyment, not in the terrors of death. To the small children the present was very weary; but, reasoning in their way, they concluded that that present could not last much longer. It must come to an end like the tiresome journey up the great river, when the barge stuck fast in the mud, and mamma cried, and papa called the boatman by that Hindoostanee name which they themselves were always whipped for using. The restraint of our protracted incarceration was to them intolerably irksome. There was neither milk, nor pudding, nor jam, nor mangoes, nor any one to cuddle them, or sing to them, or listen to their romances, and their wishes, and their grievances. The gentleman who once was most kind to them would now come home from shooting all black, and grimy, and with a rough beard, and would stand at the table and eat quickly, and then run out again without taking any notice of them: and some day or other he would be carried in on a shutter, looking so pale and weak: and some day, perhaps, he never came back at all. When they asked a lady to scold the servants for getting them such a nasty breakfast, she only kissed them, and sobbed, and called them poor darlings. They sorely missed the fond and patient bearer, that willing playmate and much-enduring slave, whom Mrs. Sherwood's charming tale has rendered a household word in English schoolrooms. Left to their own tiny discretions, the dear creatures, unconscious of danger, would toddle out of the crowded barrack, and betake themselves to some primitive game which demanded no very elaborate provision of toys. What was it to them that every half minute a big black ball came hopping along amidst puffs of dust, or that little things which they could not see flew about humming louder than cock-chafers or bumble bees? With unexampled barbarity the sepoy sharpshooters forbore to respect these innocent groups. The peril, which some incurred through inexperience, was sought by others under the pressure of despondency. One unhappy woman, unable to support the burden of her existence, ran out from the shelter of the walls leading in each hand a child, and was dragged back, despite of herself, by a private soldier, who freely risked his life to preserve that which she was bent on losing. Not a few native domestics refused to desert their employers. Over-worked and under-thanked, with short-commons, and, if captured by the mutineers, a shorter shrift, they stayed on, not for the sake of their pittance of wages, but actuated solely by the ties of duty, gratitude, and attachment. Most of them were soon dismissed from service, for no fault, and with no warning. Three were killed by the explosion of a shell. Another was shot through the head as he was hurrying to the outposts intent upon serving his master's dinner before it had time to cool. An ayah, while dandling an infant, lost both her legs by the blow of a cannon-ball. That was in truth a dismal nursery.

Want of water was a constant and growing evil. At the best, a single well would have furnished a pitiably insufficient supply for a thousand mouths during an Indian June: and that well was from the first the favourite target of the hostile artillerymen. Guns were trained on to the exact spot; so that the appearance of a man with a pitcher by day, and by night the creaking of the tackle, was the signal for a shower of grape. The framework of beam and brick which protected the drawers was soon shot away. The machinery went next, and the buckets were thenceforward hauled up hand over hand from a depth of more than sixty feet. The Hindoo water-carriers were slain early in the siege, and their place was supplied by English soldiers, who nominally were paid at the rate of five rupees for every pail: though the brave fellows knew that, when a few days had gone by, it would matter little in whose hands the silver might happen to lie. That water was purchased with blood and not with money. John Mackillop, of the Civil Service, veiling devotion under a jocose pretence of self-depreciation, told his friends that, though no fighting man, he was willing to make himself useful where he could, and accordingly claimed to be appointed Captain of the Well. His tenure of the office was prolonged beyond his own expectation. It was not till a week had passed that he was laid dying on a bed in the hospital with a grape-shot in the groin. His last words expressed a desire that the lady to whom he had promised a drink should not be disappointed. For some days a few gallons were procured at a frightful hazard from a tank situated on the south-east of the intrenchment. Those who were conscious how dear a price was paid for every draught, thirsted in silence; but the babies kept up a perpetual moan more terrible to some stout souls than a ten minutes' hobble across the plain, a heavy skinful of water round the loins, and an ounce of lead in the ankle. Captain Thomson saw the children of his brother officers "sucking the pieces of old water-bags, putting scraps of canvass and leather straps into the mouth to try and get a single drop of moisture upon their parched lips." The distress of our countrymen was enhanced by the plague of dust to which Cawnpore is subject on account of the character of the soil. A traveller who visited the station ten or twelve years before the mutiny, complains that he got no gratification out of a grand review from which he had promised himself much pleasure, because the show was throughout enveloped in clouds which totally concealed it from his eyes.

There was yet another well, which yielded nothing then: which will yield nothing till the sea, too, gives up her dead. It lay two hundred yards from the rampart, beneath the walls of the unfinished barracks. Thither at an hour varied nightly, for fear lest the rebel shot should swell the funeral, with stealthy step and scant attendance the slain of the previous day were borne. When morning broke the battle raged around that sepulchre. Overhead the cannon roared, and men charged to and fro. But those below rested none the less peacefully; their last cartridge bitten; their last achievement performed: their last pang of hunger and affliction undergone and already forgotten. There were deposited, within the space of three weeks, two hundred and fifty English people, a fourth by tale of the whole garrison. As in a season of trouble and lawlessness men bury away their jewels and their gold against the return of tranquillity and order: so the survivors committed to the faithful mould their dear treasures, trusting that time and the fortune of war would enable our country to honour her lost ones with a more solemn rite, and a worthier tomb. Brief was the service whispered on the brink of that sad well in the sultry summer night. It was much, when they came to the grave, while the corpse was being made ready to be laid into the earth, if the priest then said: "In the midst of life we are in death. Of whom may we seek for succour, but of thee, O Lord, who for our sins art justly displeased?"

"Yet, O Lord God most holy, O Lord most mighty, O holy and most merciful Saviour, deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death."

And again, while the earth was being cast upon the body by some standing by, the priest might with the assent of all declare that it was of His great mercy that it had pleased Almighty God to take unto Himself the soul of the dear brother there departed.

Throughout the siege public worship, at stated hours, and of prescribed length and form, neither did nor could take place: but the spirit and the essential power of religion were not wanting. The station chaplain, Mr. Moncrieff, made it his concern that no one should die or suffer without the consolations of Christianity. And whenever he could be spared from the hospital, this shepherd of a pest-stricken flock, he would go the round of the batteries, and read a few Prayers and Psalms to the fighting folk. With heads bent, and hands folded over the muzzles of their rifles; soothed, some by genuine piety, some by the associations of gladsome Christmas mornings and drowsy Sunday afternoons spent in the aisle of their village church; they listened calmly to the familiar words, those melancholy and resolute men. Each congregation was more thin than the last. There were always present some two or three to whom never again would grace be given to join with accord in the common supplication. The people of Cawnpore might say in the language used in a like strait by a brave and God-fearing soldier, the Greatheart of English History:—"Indeed we are at this time a very crazy company; yet we live in His sight, and shall work the time that is appointed us, and shall rest after that in peace."

The condition of the besieged presented a complete contrast to the state of things on the other side of the wall. The numbers and the hopes of the insurgents mounted daily. Every morning some new Rajah or Nawab paraded through the suburbs in his palanquin bright with silver poles and silken hangings, preceded by drums, and standards, and led chargers, and followed by a stream of lancers and matchlocks. Every evening a fresh eruption of scoundrelism surged up from the narrow crooked alleys and foul bazaars of the black city. Nor were the Hindoos and Mahomedans of the revolted battalions left without the satisfaction and encouragement of learning what great deeds had been wrought elsewhere by the champions of the united faiths. In the month of June the following document found its way from Delhi to Cawnpore:—

"To all Hindoos and Mussulmans, Citizens and Servants of Hindostan, the Officers of the Army now at Delhi and Meerut send Greeting.

"It is well known that in these days all the English have entertained these evil designs—first to destroy the religion of the whole Hindostani army, and then to make the people Christians by compulsion. Therefore we, solely on account of our religion, have combined with the people, and have not spared alive one infidel, and have re-established the Delhi dynasty on these terms, and thus act in obedience to orders and receive double pay. Hundreds of guns and a large amount of treasure have fallen into our hands; therefore it is fitting that whoever of the soldiers and the people dislike turning Christians should unite with one heart and act courageously, not leaving the seed of these infidels remaining. For any quantity of supplies delivered to the army the owners are to take the receipts of the officers; and they will receive double payment from the Imperial Government. Whoever shall in these times exhibit cowardice, or credulously believe the promises of those impostors, the English, shall very shortly be put to shame for such a deed; and, rubbing the hands of sorrow, shall receive for their fidelity the reward the ruler of Lucknow got. It is further necessary that all Hindoos and Mussulmans unite in this struggle, and, following the instructions of some respectable people, keep themselves secure, so that good order may be maintained, the poorer classes kept contented, and they themselves be exalted to rank and dignity; also, that all, so far as it is possible, copy this proclamation, and despatch it everywhere, so that all true Hindoos and Mussulmans may be alive and watchful, and fix it in some conspicuous place (but prudently, to avoid detection), and strike a blow with a sword before giving circulation to it. The first pay of the soldiers of Delhi will be thirty rupees per month for a trooper, and ten rupees for a footman. Nearly one hundred thousand men are ready; and there are thirteen flags of the English regiments, and about fourteen standards from different parts, now raised aloft for our religion, for God, and the conqueror; and it is the intention of Cawnpore to root out the seed of the Devil. This is what we of the army here wish."

This message was succeeded by a proclamation issued from the peacock throne, in which the Mogul promised a monthly wage of twelve rupees and a respectable estate to every sepoy who would rally to the banner of the ancient dynasty. He likewise ordained that no cows should thenceforward be killed throughout the land, and finished by pronouncing a malediction upon the head of any one who should intercept the imperial courier. The wretch was doomed to eat pork and beef: and, as the messenger was eventually hanged by an English officer of the Seventieth Infantry, it may be presumed that the curse has by this time been fulfilled to the letter.

The rebel cause was soon strengthened by a more valuable reinforcement than either the posse comitatus of the province, or the sympathy of the Delhi mutineers. At the village of Chowbeypore, on the Great North Road, had been stationed a detachment from the garrison of Lucknow, comprising a squadron of native cavalry, and two companies of sepoys, commanded by Captain Staples, four subalterns, and a European serjeant-major. At about two o'clock on the afternoon of Tuesday, the ninth of June, these gentlemen were roused from their luncheon by the sound of a bugle playing the "Assembly." Rushing forth, they demanded why so strange a liberty had been taken, and were told that it was by the orders of the Nana. At the mention of this ill-omened name our officers flung themselves on horseback, and rode for dear life, with all the disadvantages resulting from ignorance of the country and a bad start. That was a run in which the game was allowed no law. The Captain was shot down from his saddle, and cut in pieces where he lay. Two Englishmen took to the water like hunted stags, and there miserably perished. Two others were headed by a mob of villagers, and driven back among the sabres and pistols of their pursuers. Lieutenant Bolton alone, by dint of hard riding, escaped to Cawnpore with a bullet-hole in his cheek;—if escape it may be called, which was only the postponement of death. After a chase of sixteen miles he reached the neighbourhood of the town at nightfall; passed unobserved through the lines of the mutineers; and camped out on the plain, waiting until dawn should disclose to him the outline of the intrenchment. Our sentries, astonished by the apparition of a cavalier riding at the earthwork through the twilight like a mounted Remus, fired, and struck his horse. No one, however, was surprised to find that even a crippled steed could clear those defences at a leap. The fugitive was heartily greeted by his countrymen, and entertained with such hospitality as their situation would admit. Wounded and exhausted as he was, he proved well worth his keep.

The troops who had revolted at Chowbeypore marched into Cawnpore, bringing with them three English heads in a basket, and taking up on their way a toll-keeper named Joseph Carter, and his wife; a young person, who was daily expecting her first baby. This offering, combined agreeably to his taste of the dead and the living, was mightily acceptable to the Nana. With fraternal kindness he made a present of the grisly trophies to Bala Rao, who exposed them in his saloon, and gave a sort of conversazione at which they formed the leading attraction. Mr. Carter was shot, as a matter of course; and his little widow would have shared his fate, had not the relicts of the late Peishwa, the step-mothers by adoption of the Maharaja, felt a womanly commiseration for one so tender and so afflicted. The good ladies begged hard for this single example of clemency, and begged in vain. At length their pride of sex was roused against such determined brutality towards a woman who had so lately been a wife, and was so soon to be a mother, and they threatened to commit suicide unless their petition was granted. The Nana then gave way, and permitted his relatives to carry off their protÉgÉe to the apartments appropriated to the females in the palace at Bithoor, where they placed her under the charge of an experienced Mahomedan nurse. He insisted, however, that she should be considered as under custody, and appointed a squad of troopers to see that she was forthcoming whenever it might suit his will and pleasure. He never lost sight of a victim. He boasted the worst half of, at any rate, one kingly quality,—an unerring memory.

On the next Friday the remnant of the native force which had mutinied at Benares made their appearance on the opposite side of the river. The exit of these gentlemen from the Holy City had not been of a nature to gratify their conceit, and their entry into Cawnpore was the reverse of triumphant. They straggled up, jaded and dispirited, without any semblance of martial order, some on horseback, and others perched up in the uncomfortable country-carts of Hindostan, which seem to have been devised with the express object of conveying the least possible amount of freight with the greatest expenditure of traction power. Their condition excited the contempt and cupidity of the officials appointed to superintend the river traffic in the interest of the Nana; who accordingly refused to ferry across these shabby auxiliaries for less than a rupee per head. Considering that the majority of the passengers were of pure Sikh blood, their spirit must indeed have been broken before they could have endured such insolence and extortion.

On the fifteenth of June, a welcome message was brought to the Maharaja from the Meer Nawab, a Mussulman of rank, who sent word that he was coming up from the eastward with a couple of thousand regular infantry, and a full complement of artillery. Azimoolah resolved that his subordinates should not have an opportunity of repeating their conduct of the previous week. Every mark of respect was to be displayed towards so august and puissant a chieftain. The bridge contractors were commissioned to collect barges for the transit of the expected allies, and the confectioners of the town received instructions to prepare for their refreshment a mÉnu, containing all those dishes of sweetened animal food so nauseous to a European palate. On the morrow the Nawab arrived at the head of two fine regiments, which had been raised on the occasion of Lord Dalhousie's annexation, amidst the deep but suppressed uneasiness of all who gave the native mind credit for the human qualities of ambition, shame, and patriotism;—of all who believed the Hindoo capable of any loftier sentiment than the desire to curry favour with an English magistrate, touch a hundred rupees per mensem from an English treasury, talk broken Addison, and read the "Deserted Village" in the original. On the rolls of our army these battalions were styled the Fourth and Fifth Oude Locals: but sepoys have invariably some pet title for their own corps, (in most cases a corruption of the name of its first colonel,) more suited to the Indian tongue than our complicated military nomenclature. Thus the First, the Fifty-third, and the Fifty-sixth Bengal Native Infantry, were spoken of familiarly as "Gillises," "Lamboorn's," and "Garsteen's." The Oude soldiers under the Meer Nawab were known to themselves and their compatriots as the men of the Nadiree and the Akhtaree Regiments.

When the new-comers caught sight of the fortress which had hitherto baffled the ingenuity and courage of their associates, they expressed no small contempt for the generalship of the Nana, but bade him be at his ease, for that they would engage to put him in possession of the intrenchment after they had enjoyed a day's rest and surfeit. And so, on the eighteenth of June, at the hour when, exactly two and forty years before, the French tirailleurs were swarming through the woods of Hougoumont up to the loopholes of the wall which they never passed, the Oude mutineers charged in a mass across the plain, and over our rampart; bore down the defenders; overturned a gun; and seemed for a moment in a fair way of justifying their vaunt. A moment only: for, without waiting for orders, angry Sahibs came running from all sides to the rescue. Our people slewed round a nine-pounder; gave them first some stockingfuls of grape, and then an English rush; and sent them back to their master fewer and wiser than they came.

The rebel position presented an aspect animated and picturesque in a high degree. To the north of our fortification, between the Racket-court and the Chapel of Ease, was planted a battery well armed with mortars and twenty-four pounder cannon. In this region the command was taken by the Nunhey Nawab, the Mahomedan grandee, who, with Bakur Ali, and others, had been plundered and imprisoned by the Brahmins during their first outbreak of religious spite. The high-spirited Moslem soldiery at once refused to brook this outrage, and began to talk of setting up the Nawab's claim to royalty against that of the Maharaja: upon which the latter released his prisoners, and thenceforward behaved towards them rather as an equal than as a master. The Nana's rival showed both judgment and vigour. He beat up all the pensioned veterans of the neighbourhood who had formerly served in the artillery, and employed work-people of both sexes in keeping him supplied with red-hot shot. On one occasion an apprentice to the trade took it into his head to try the experiment of heating a loaded shell, and succeeded in blowing up a woman and five men, including, we may presume, himself. The Nawab passed most of his time in the gallery of the Racket-court, where, in the late afternoon of more quiet days, had lolled a cluster of chatty Englishmen; opening bottles of soda-water; chaffing the players with the threadbare raillery that suffices for the simple taste of a limited community; descending in parties of four, cheroot in mouth, when the cry of "game-ball all" warned them that their turn was come. Occasionally he would issue forth to see how his gunners were getting on, and to watch the effect of their practice through a telescope. A half-caste Christian, who had disguised himself as a Mahomedan with admirable skill, gives an interesting account of what passed in this quarter. He says, "I saw Nunhey Nawab coming to the batteries accompanied by a number of troopers, and sepoys, and his own attendants also; and I was told by the people that the Nawab had received a post of great dignity, and was in command of a battery. About one o'clock I came close to Major-General Wheeler's bungalow, and, finding a piece of mat in the compound, lay down on it, and saw several troopers going about, forcing people to carry water to the batteries. Hearing an uproar I rose from the place where I was, when a trooper, seeing me, told me that it was a great shame for a young Mussulman like me to be thus idling away my time, and that I should assist at the batteries. He also told me that a young man, the son of Kurrum Ali, the one-eyed, a pensioned soubahdar, was sent for by the Nawab, and had laid a gun so precisely that the shot carried away a portion of one of the barracks within the intrenchment, for which he received a reward of ninety rupees, and a shawl. I replied to this that I possessed no arms, and had never been a soldier." It was no wonder that a battery where the service was conducted on so open-handed a system soon became the popular resort. The lovely Azeezun made this spot her head-quarters. She appears to have exercised a strange fascination over our good friend Nanukchund, so frequently does she appear in the course of his narrative. Whether he cherished towards her a sneaking kindness; or a grudge for some past incivility; or, as is most probable, both the one and the other, he certainly never leaves her alone for many pages together. In his quaint way he writes:—"It shows great daring in Azeezun, that she is always armed and present in the batteries, owing to her attachment to the cavalry; and she takes her favourites among them aside, and entertains them with milk, &c. on the public road."

The Meer Nawab planted the cannon, which he had brought with him across the river, on the south-east of our position, near the Artillery Mess House. This manoeuvre forthwith debarred the garrison from obtaining occasional and perilous access to the tank; a privation the more severely felt, because the Oude men, bent on avenging their repulse, worked their pieces with a will, and kept up at point-blank range so hot a fire upon the mouth of our well that the drawing of water was a deed of heroism by night, and in daylight an act of insanity. In the west, Bakur Ali, who had shared with the Nunhey Nawab his disgrace and his restoration to favour, bombarded our outposts from among the stables of the Second Cavalry; while in and about the lines of the First Native Infantry stood a number of heavy guns, known by the collective appellation of "the Sepoy Battery," under cover of which a Jemmadar, who fancied himself gifted with a turn for engineering, was sinking a mine by the aid of some invalid sappers and miners, whom he had persuaded to place themselves at his disposal. In the south-west direction was a stately mansion, which formerly held rank as a charitable institution, under the title of the "Salvador," a name which the effeminate articulation of the native had long before this converted into the "Savada." As the Mahomedan faction mustered strong in the vicinity of the Racket-court, so the Savada soon became the centre of Hindoo influence. It was the special haunt of the Nana. Here were his ministers, his diviners, his courtiers, and the prisoners from whom he purposed to extort something besides their breath. Here was the battery which went by his name. Here was the tent of his most able and ardent partizan, Teeka Sing, the generalissimo. Here too, in an agreeable corner of the grounds, under the shade of a conspicuous grove, conveniently remote alike from the camp of the Moslem and the muzzles of the English artillery, was pitched his own pavilion; for he seems to have inherited the Mahratta preference for canvas over brick and mortar. The chiefs of that hardy and unquiet race seldom had a tight roof over their heads until they were laid beneath some mausoleum of fair white marble, sparkling with cornelian and jasper and lapsis lazuli, constructed out of the spoils and the tribute of nations.

The mutineers showed every intention of enjoying their spell of liberty and domination. These revolted regiments were rapidly turning into mobs. The work of the batteries was left to the retainers of ambitious Rajahs; to pensioned gunners; and to such amateurs as had a stomach for fighting, and a taste for the shawls and cash lavished by the Nunhey Nawab. The sepoys, meanwhile, lounged in the shops which fringed the canal, eating sweetstuff with schoolboy avidity, and drinking sherbet to their hearts' content; or swaggered along the streets with a nonchalance copied from their reminiscences of the fashionable frequenters of the band-stand, criticizing the driving of those among their comrades who had been fortunate enough to lay their hands upon a buggy belonging to a British officer. No decent people were to be seen in the public places. No business was done in the main thoroughfares. The tradesmen, in piteous trepidation, eyed the passing scamps from behind their shutters, consoling their enforced idleness by recollecting in what angle of the garden their money was interred, and framing excuses against the probable visit of the Nana's tax-collector, or the possible return of the English authorities. The opium-sellers and the innkeepers, who in these days anterior to Mr. Wilson's budget had not attained to the dignity of licensed victuallers, alone drove a thriving trade. The warriors of the Religions smoked, and chewed, and snored supine, clad in cotton drawers and a pair of clumsy shoes; their necks encircled by the Brahminical thread, token of their privileged and sacred extraction. To this costume they superadded a red coat, at such times as the stings of conscience, or the reproaches of priest and paramour, drove them out to get a lazy shot at the infidels and an appetite for their curry.

The earliest care of the Nana had been to set on foot a respectable municipal organization. With this object in view, he appointed to the chief magistracy in the city one Hoolass Sing, who may have been a traitor, but was, apparently, only a time-server. This person was chosen by the advice of a deputation composed of the leading townsmen; a tent-maker, a jeweller, and a dealer in opiates. Hoolass Sing had no sinecure. It was only by the exercise of judicious firmness, alternating with seasonable pliability, that he contrived to protect Cawnpore from the rapacity of the soldiery, and the wrath of those rural nobles whose paternal acres had been sold by the English Government to recover arrears of land-tax, and purchased by moneyed cits, who wished to cut a figure in country society. The duty of victualling the troops was committed to a blind gentleman of the name of Moolla, who, doubtless, saw quite well enough to water the rice and omit to sift the meal. A burlesque judicial court was formed of Azimoolah, Jwala, Pershad, and other creatures of the Maharaja; and presided over by Baba Bliut, who delivered his decisions seated on a billiard-table in Mr. Duncan's hotel. This tribunal passed a variety of sentences without establishing any very valuable precedent. Once, in an unaccountable fit of morality, it sentenced a luckless rogue to lose his hand for theft; but, for obvious and selfish reasons, the judges appear to have refrained from again taking cognizance of this crime. A Mahomedan butcher was condemned to mutilation for having killed a cow; and certain individuals were paraded through the town on donkeys, "for disreputable livelihood:" a punishment which, when the charge was made known, must have excited very general sympathy and indignation. Gradually this body, like the Committee of Public Safety in the French Revolution, assumed to itself a supervision over every department of the administration. When the powder ran short, the principal dealer in saltpetre was thrown into prison, until he produced the requisite quantity of that article. A native merchant was required to provide cloaks for half a battalion, at the rate of two and threepence a-piece; a scale of payment which must have inspired him with an unaffected regret for the liberal contracts of the old Company. With a keener relish, Baba Bhut undertook to account for the Englishmen who still lurked about, watching for an opportunity of slipping away to Allahabad or Agra. On the eleventh of June, Mr. Williams, a writer in one of the public offices, was traced out and slaughtered. Two days subsequently, the head of young Mr. Duncan was brought into his own father's house. The murderer was rewarded with the present of a pound, and the porter got a couple of rupees.

At the expiration of a fortnight, an event occurred which, for a while, afforded to the beseiged people a more suggestive and agreeable matter of conversation than the rise of the mercury in the tube, and the sinking of the flour in the barrels. A native water-carrier skulked over from the opposite lines, and gave out that, on account of his love and respect for the Sahibs, he had set his heart upon being the first to bring them the good news; that there were two companies of white soldiers on the other side of the Ganges, who were supposed to have marched down from Lucknow; that they had guns with them, and were making as if they would cross the river on the morrow; that the rebel camp was in a panic, and that everybody was saying how much he had all along intended to do for the Sahibs, had he only dared. Next day he turned up again with the intelligence that the Europeans had been detained on the opposite bank by an unexpected flood, but that they were busily engaged in knocking together rafts, and might be looked for within the forty-eight hours. Those hours passed, and twice and thrice those hours, and there came not the aspect of help, nor the renewal of confidence, nor the welcome sight of light faces, nor the welcome sound of approaching artillery. The soi-disant water-carrier made no third appearance. His two first visits had taught him all that Azimoolah desired to know of our impoverished and defenceless plight.

Our spies were less lucky; or it may be that the sturdy and straightforward British nature cannot promptly adapt itself to those frauds which are proverbially fair in war. There was in the garrison a soldier named Blenman, an Eurasian by birth, astute, and singularly courageous, but in temper uncertain, and impatient of control. There, and at that time, such a man was worth his weight in meal or powder, and his superiors did well to humour him. Cool, observant, and bold to temerity, the most delicate and hazardous of services had for him an innate attraction. After trying his wings in some partial flights, he prepared for a great and final enterprise, and volunteered to penetrate as far as Allahabad with a report of our calamities, and an appeal for instant succour. He disguised himself as a native cook, an easy task, for his complexion showed that he had far more than the due share of maternal blood; and sallied forth with a pistol and fifteen rupees stuffed into his cotton drawers. He passed unnoticed or unsuspected no less than seven horse pickets. The eighth stopped, and searched him, in spite of his asseverations that he was a poor leather-dresser, taking a walk through the night air, after working all day in a close alley over the saddles and holsters of the gentlemen troopers of the Second Cavalry. Too plausible to be killed off-hand, and too questionable to be neglected, he was stripped and sent back whence he came, with no other information than that the investment of our position was even more strict and complete than had been apprehended.

A half-caste government official offered to make an attempt to obtain intelligence, and to bribe over some of the influential citizens of Cawnpore, on condition that Sir Hugh would permit his family to leave the intrenchment. His terms were accepted. He set forth, but was at once detected, and taken before the Maharaja, who sentenced him to three years' imprisonment with hard labour; a unique example of leniency, curious, as proving how firmly that usurper was persuaded that his rule would now be permanent. Ghouse Mahomed, a faithful sepoy of the Fifty-sixth, succeeded in getting farther than his predecessors. He crept along the ground in the darkness, until he met two or three men with four yoke of oxen taking supplies to the Savada house. He told them that he was going to the city to buy some grave clothes for his brother, a brave who had died that day for the good cause in one of the advanced batteries. He was allowed to proceed upon his pious errand; but, when he reached the native town, it was as much as he could do to conceal himself from the inquisition of the rebel police. Many emissaries were despatched from our fortification, but Blenman alone returned. The others, through the months subsequent to our re-occupation of the district, came straggling in, as they could effect their escape from the camp of the fugitive Nana, with noses slit, and hands or ears chopped off by an ignorant and inhuman operator.

The remaining contents of the Cawnpore budget derive their principal interest from a consideration of the circumstances under which they were produced. Not even at such a season would Englishmen put their deeper feelings within an envelope; and the gossip of the station in that June was hardly calculated to enliven a correspondence. On the night of Sunday, the twenty-first, Major Vibart transmitted these lines to Lucknow:—

"We have been cannonaded for six hours a day by twelve guns. This evening, in three hours, upwards of thirty shells [mortars] were thrown into the intrenchment. This has occurred daily for the last eight days. An idea may be formed of our casualties, and how little protection the barracks afford to the women. Any aid, to be effective, must be immediate. In event of rain falling, our position would be untenable.

"According to telegraphic despatches received previous to the outbreak, a thousand Europeans were to have been here on the fourteenth instant. This force may be on its way up. Any assistance you can send might co-operate with it. Nine-pounder ammunition, chiefly cartridges, is required. Should the above force arrive, we can, in return, insure the safety of Lucknow. Being simply a military man, General Wheeler has no power to offer bribes in land and money to the insurgents, nor any means whatever of communicating with them. You can ascertain the best means of crossing the river. Nujuffgurh Ghaut is suggested. It is earnestly requested that whatever is done may be effected without a moment's delay. We have lost about a third of our original number. The enemy are strongest in artillery. They appear not to have more than four hundred or five hundred infantry. They move their guns with difficulty, by means of unbroken bullocks. The infantry are great cowards, and easily repulsed.

In the following letter there is one sad touch: the widower writing over his elbow "on the floor," "in the midst of the greatest dirt, noise, and confusion."

"I was agreeably surprised to receive your most welcome letter of the twenty-first, the messenger of which managed cleverly to find his way here; but that surprise was exceeded by the astonishment felt by us all, at the total want of knowledge you seem to be in regarding our position and prospects; while we have been, since the sixth of the month, equally in the dark respecting the doings of the world around us. Your loss at Lucknow is frightful, in common with that of us all; for, since the date referred to, every one here has been reduced to ruin. On that date they commenced their attack, and fearfully have they continued now for eighteen days and nights; while the condition of misery experienced by all is utterly beyond description in this place. Death and mutilation, in all their forms of horror, have been daily before us. The numerical amount of casualties has been frightful, caused both by sickness and the implements of war, the latter having been fully employed against our devoted garrison by the villainous insurgents, who have, unluckily, been enabled to furnish themselves therewith from the repository which contained them. We await the arrival of succour with the most anxious expectation, after all our endurance and sufferings; for that, Sir Henry Lawrence has been applied to by Sir Hugh, and we hope earnestly it will be afforded, and that immediately, to avert further evil. If he will answer that appeal with 'deux cents soldats Britanniques,' we shall be doubtless at once enabled to improve our position in a vital manner: and we deserve that the appeal should be so answered forthwith. You will be grieved to learn that among our casualties from sickness my poor dear wife and infant have been numbered. The former sank on the twelfth, and the latter on the nineteenth. I am writing this on the floor, and in the midst of the greatest dirt, noise, and confusion. Pray urge our reinforcement to the Chief Commissioner.

The employment of the French sentence is worthy of remark. During these troubled times, every modern language was pressed into our service; and more than one old field-officer mustered up his school reminiscences of the Anabasis and the Iliad, to compose a bulletin, curiously blended of Attic, Æolic, and Aldershot, which would have puzzled Grote or Hermann at least as much as it could possibly perplex any mutineer or highwayman who might chance to intercept the messenger.

Things had got to a terrible pass on our side of the wall. All the present sweetness of existence was long since vanished, and the last flicker of future hope had now died away. But, moved by a generous despair and an invincible self-respect, our people still fought on. By daring and vigilance, by countless shifts and unremitting labour, they staved off ruin for another day, and yet another. At rare intervals behind the earthwork they stood—gaunt and feeble likenesses of men,—clutching with muffled fingers the barrels of their muskets, which glowed with heat intolerable to the naked hand, so fierce was the blaze of the summer sun. Straining their ears to catch any fancied sounds of distant cannonading, they gazed across the plain to where the horizon faded into a fantastic mirage, which mocked their fevered eyes with fair scenes of forest, and mountain, and with infinite expanses of glassy water broken by golden islets; while in the foreground the jackals prowled about the debated space, and the pariah dogs snarled at the grey crows, and slunk away from the spots where the great vultures sat in obscene and sulky conclave. Dim must have been the thoughts, confused the images, which flitted through their wearied intellect; indistinct memories of home and youth; faint regrets, and fainter resolutions; fitful yearnings for dear beings whom they would never again behold. One would surmise how his mother in far-off England would bear her sorrow, and who would be selected to break the news. Another would calculate dates, and try to convince himself that his boy at Rugby should have got the scholarship examination off his mind before the receipt of the fatal tidings. But, whatever might be the subject of contemplation, no smile relieved the stolid apathy of their careworn features, save when dejection was for an instant charmed away by the buoyant audacity of Moore. "He was a strong man. In the dark perils of war, in the high places of the field, hope shone in him like a pillar of fire, when it had gone out in all the others." Brave and vivacious himself, he was the cause that bravery and vivacity were in other men. It was not that he had less at stake than those around him: for his wife and children were in the entrenchment. When the vicissitudes of battle called her husband to the outposts, Mrs. Moore would step across with her work, and spend the day beneath a little hut of bamboos covered with canvas, which the garrison of Barrack Number Two had raised for her in their most sheltered corner. Seldom had fair lady a less appropriate bower.

The twenty-third of June, 1757, was the date of the great rout that placed Bengal beneath the sway of the foreigner. In 1857 the ringleaders of the mutiny had fixed on the dawning of that day as the signal for a general rebellion over the entire north of India; but the outbreak at Meerut and the massacre of Delhi precipitated and weakened the blow. In that dread year those awful events were to us as saving mercies. At Cawnpore, however, the Nana and his crew, actuated by a partiality for the celebration of centenaries not altogether confined to Asiatics, were bent upon effecting something worthy of the occasion. All through the night of the twenty-second the defenders of the outlying barracks were kept on the alert by sounds which betokened that the sepoys in the adjacent buildings were more than usually numerous and restless. Lieutenant Thomson sent to head-quarters for a reinforcement; but Moore replied that he could spare nobody except himself and Lieutenant Delafosse. In the course of a few minutes the pair arrived, and at once sallied forth armed, one with a sword, and the other with an empty musket. Moore shouted out, "Number one to the front!" and the enemy, taking it for granted that the well-known word of command would bring upon them a full company of Sahibs with fixed bayonets and cocked revolvers, broke cover and ran like rabbits. But towards morning they returned in force, and attacked with such determined ferocity that there remained more dead Hindoos outside the doorway than there were living Europeans within. At the same moment the main fortification was assaulted by the whole strength of the insurrection. Field guns, pulled along by horses and bullocks, were brought up within a few hundred yards, unlimbered, and pointed at our wall. The troopers, who had bound themselves by the most solemn oath of their religion to conquer or to perish, charged at a gallop in one quarter; while in another advanced the dense array of infantry, preceded by a host of skirmishers, who rolled before them great bundles of cotton, proof against our bullets. It was all in vain. Our countrymen, too, had their anniversary to keep. They shot down the teams which tugged the artillery. They fired the bales, drove the sharpshooters back upon the columns, and sent the columns to the right-about in unseemly haste. They taught the men of the Second Cavalry that broken vows, and angered gods, and the waters of Ganges poured fruitlessly on the perjured head were less terrible than British valour in the last extremity. The contest was short but sharp. The defeated combatants retired to brag and to carouse; the victors to brood, to sicken, and to starve. That evening a party of sepoys drew near our lines, made obeisance after their fashion, and requested leave to bury the slain. This acknowledgment of an empty triumph, which would have spread a lively joy throughout the ranks of an old Spartan army even in the most desperate strait, was but a poor consolation to these Englishmen under the shadow of their impending doom.

[2] These Brahminee bulls are the standing nuisance of Indian city life. They saunter along the public way, laying the shops under contribution, frightening the women, and disgusting the equestrians. To strike them is a high crime, social and religious. To kill them involves present death, and future damnation. At every turn may be seen some old fellow with a platterful of grain in his hand, alluring one of these creatures away from his store. The authorities of Calcutta at length took courage, collected all the Brahminee bulls, and put them in the carts of the Government scavengers. When Scindiah paid his last visit to the capital, he was much scandalized at so impious a regulation, and expressed his desire to buy up the animals, and restore them to their former condition of life. But he wisely refrained, when it was represented to him that, the moment his back was turned, the bulls would again find their way into the public service.