domestic. A cook was busy superintending several pots set upon fires in the open air, a second prepared the curry-paste, a third was busy with plates, knives, and forks. In the rear of the servants' tents, which were two in number-making, with the master's, four -were two small tents for the syces, grass-cutters, and camel-men, or doodwallahs, behind which were picketed three horses, three camels, and a pair of bullocks, and ere we left, another servant drove in a few goats, which were used for milking. I was curious to know who this millionnaire could be, and was astonished to learn that it was only Captain Smith, of the Mekawattee Irregulars, who was travelling down country, with the usual train of domestics and animals required under the circumstances. The whole of this little camp did not contain more than eight or nine tents; but there were at least 150 domestics and a menagerie of animals connected with them. The tope was exceeding rich; the trees swarming with the common noisy green parroquet, and with the ever-active squeaking squirrel.

As there were no gharrys ready for us, Stewart and I started off on a walk through the country-a short one-incited thereto by the possibility of putting up a deer, or slaying a jackal. The fields were covered with dall-crops-a tall pulse with deep green leaves, which grows to the height of seven or eight feet; narrow foot-paths led here and there through them, and appeared to form the boundaries of the fields. Whitish-grey mud walls, rising a foot or two above the level of the dall-fields, or visible through the topes, indicated the native villages, which seemed especially wretched, from the want of windows and the apparent absence of roofs to the houses. The natives we met

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avoided us, skulking off by side-paths; and one or two women drawing water at a well, fled at our approach, as if we were demons. Their antipathy was shared by a herd, or drove, or flock of apes, which we encountered in one of the topes; a wilderness of young and old and middle-aged ladies and gentlemen, who chatted and grinned at us, from stumps and branches in endless variety of grimace and contortion. How is it that one is influenced by their offensive resemblance to humanity to abstain from shooting them? I am sure that a young quadrumane is by no means bad eating; but all are agreed that the sufferings of one wounded by the hunter are expressed in a manner so terribly human, as to cause great repugnance among those who have once killed an ape or monkey to fire at one afterwards. And yet they were very impudent indeed-scolding and abusing us as hard as they could chatter, whilst the matrons, in evident distrust, carried off their family to the remotest branches.

On our return we found gharrys waiting for us, and the whole of the party which had started from Allahabad set out for Cawnpore at five o'clock at night. As there was no advantage to be gained by arriving at the Cawnpore cantonments in the middle of the night, we halted on the road after half-an-hour's drive, and in the shade proceeded to make our dinner. Sir Robert Garrett had a preserved tongue in a tin case, like a huge red sugar-loaf, and a strong wish was expressed to investigate the interior, which would, it was supposed, form an agreeable addition to the resources of our banquet; but we had no means of opening it. It turned all the edges of our knives,

VOL. I.

M

broke all their points, set forks and hunting-knives at defiance; at last, in a rage, we put it up on end against a tree, and I fired my revolver through the angle of the case, so as to make a hole in the tin. Having first made this lodgement in the salient, the rest of the work was easy, and the tongue almost answered our ardent expectations.

About seven we halted again at the bungalow, in a very decayed straggling old town, called Futtehpore. There were many sheds well-thatched, and substantial enough, in the court-yard, which had been erected for the soldiers on their march along the trunk-road; and again one read the old stereotyped inscriptions on the walls, which almost made me regret that writing was included in the branches of education taught to the soldier. Near us was encamped a small force-some infantry and guns. Sir Robert with Dallas set out to visit the camp, in order to see his old friend Colonel David Wood, who was in command, whilst Oxenden, Stewart, and myself managed to extricate a supper out of the Khansamah's very limited repertoire. At night the gharrys came round, and we rumbled along in peaceful sleep over the trunk-road by which Neill and Havelock had advanced to attack the Butcher of Cawnpore-a road, by the way, of which many of the trees had been hung with natives' bodies as the column under Neill and Renaud marched to open the way from Allahabad. I hear many stories, the truth of which I would doubt if I could. Our first spring was terrible; I fear our claws were indiscriminating.

CHAPTER XI.

Look at Cawnpore!-Its atrocities paralleled in History.Azimoola Khan.-Strange curiosity in an Asiatic.-Barracks. —Miserable defensive position.-Camp of Sir Colin Campbell. A compact. The Highland bonnet.-Head-Quarters' staffmess.-General Mansfield.-My tent and its attendants.-Dinner with the Commander-in-Chief.—The French General, Vinoy.

February 12th.-It was actually chilly last night! Dallas said he had never suffered so much from cold in all his life. It was 6.30 in the morning, when Stewart, who has the art of compressing himself into a very small compass, woke me up, "to look at Cawnpore." The scenes where great crimes have been perpetrated ever possess an interest, which I would not undertake to stigmatise as morbid; and surely among the sites rendered infamous for ever in the eyes of British posterity, Cawnpore will be pre-eminent as the magnitude of the atrocities with which it is connected. But, though pre-eminent among crimes, the massacre of Cawnpore is by no means alone in any of the circumstances which mark turpitude and profundity of guilt. We who suffered from it think that there never was such wickedness in the world, and the incessant efforts of a gang of forgers and utterers of base stories have surrounded it with horrors that have been vainly invented in the hope of adding to the indignation and burning desire for vengeance which the naked facts arouse. Helpless garrisons, surrendering under capitulation, have been massacred

ere now; men, women, and children have been ruthlessly butchered by the enemies of their race ere now; risings, such as that of the people of Pontus under Mithridates, of the Irish Roman Catholics against the Protestant settlers in 1641, of the actors in the Sicilian vespers, of the assassins who smote and spared none on the eve of St. Bartholomew, have been over and over again attended by inhuman cruelty, violation, and torture. The history of medieval Europe affords many instances of crimes as great as those of Cawnpore; the history of more civilized periods could afford some parallel to them in more modern times, and amid most civilized nations. In fact, the peculiar aggravation of the Cawnpore massacres was this, that the deed was done by a subject race-by black men who dared to shed the blood of their masters, and that of poor helpless ladies and children. Here we had not only a servile war and a sort of Jacquerie combined, but we had a war of religion, a war of race, and a war of revenge, of hope, of some national promptings to shake off the yoke of a stranger, and to re-establish the full power of native chiefs, and the full sway of native religions. There is a kind of God's revenge against murder in the unsuccessful issue of all enterprises commenced in massacre, and founded on cruelty and bloodshed. Whatever the causes of the mutiny and the revolt, it is clear enough that one of the modes by which the leaders, as if by common instinct, determined to effect their end was, the destruction of every white man, woman, or child who fell into their hands-a design which the kindliness of the people, or motives of policy, frustrated on many remarkable occasions. It must be remembered that