Cawnpore. George Otto Trevelyan

which they commanded that the spirit of sedition was born and nurtured. But in the day of wrath there was no distinction of person. When the baneful sirocco of mutiny, called by the imaginative Hindoo "the Devil's Wind," was abroad in the air, all milder influences yielded before its withering blast. The consciousness of the authority of the "Fouj ki Bheera," or "general will of the army," was to individual men, or regiments, almost irresistible. Some troopers in Fisher's Irregular Cavalry performed a signal act of gallantry at Lucknow, during the early days of the outbreak, for which they received a handsome reward. While waiting for their money in the verandah of the commissioner's house, they fell into conversation with certain of their fellow-villagers among his servants. "We like our colonel," said they, "and will not allow him to be harmed; but, if the whole army turns, we must turn too." A week elapsed, and these men looked quietly on from their saddles, while Colonel Fisher was shot to death by a scoundrel in the lines of the military police. Then they threw aside all semblance of discipline; murdered the second in command; and shouted to the adjutant, who was a general favourite, to ride and begone, if he desired to spare them the pain of taking his life. At one large station the men were in open mutiny, and the officers had grouped themselves in front of the battalion, expecting every moment the fatal volley. They agreed, however, not to abandon hope until they had witnessed the effect produced by the presence of a captain of old standing in the service, who was apparently loved and trusted by the whole regiment, and especially by the grenadier company, to which he had been attached for many years. When his approach was announced, every eye turned towards his bungalow, which stood on the parade-ground, close to that flank where the grenadiers were stationed. He had not gone ten paces down the line before he fell dead, pierced by a bullet from the ranks of his own command.

      In every regiment there was a Soubahdar major, or native colonel; and in every company a Soubahdar, who answered to a European captain, and a Jemmadar, who answered to a European subaltern. These were the commissioned officers, who wore swords and sashes, sat on a court-martial, and were saluted by the rank and file. They had one and all carried the musket, and there was no approach to friendship or even to familiar intercourse between them and their Saxon brethren in arms, who considered that, if they offered their soubahdar a chair during an interview on regimental business, quite enough had been done to mark the difference between a commissioned and a non-commissioned sepoy. The sergeant and the corporal were represented by the havildar and the naick; titles which make the list of killed and wounded in Indian battles so bewildering to an English reader. Thus the Brahmin battalion had a complete outfit of Brahmin officers; and this it was that rendered the rebellious army so terribly efficient for evil. When every Englishman in a corps had been murdered or scared away, the organization none the less remained intact. The regiment was still a military machine finished in every part, compact, flexible, and capable as ever of a great and sustained exertion of strength and courage. This imperfect, but, it is to be feared, tedious sketch of the composition of our native force, as it existed before the mutiny, may well be closed with the oracular words of Sir Charles Napier, the Cassandra of the old Bengal army: "Your young, independent, wild cadet, will some day find the Indian army taken out of his hands by the soubahdars. They are steady, respectful, thoughtful, stern-looking men; very zealous and military: the sole instructors of all our soldiers."

      The native town of Cawnpore contained sixty thousand inhabitants. It possessed no architectural beauties worthy to detain the traveller who, from those stately landing-places whence rise, tier above tier, the shrines and palaces of Benares, was hurrying on towards the ineffable glories of Agra. The most remarkable feature was a spacious boulevard, more than a hundred feet in breadth, called the Chandnee Choke, or street of silver. This name, common to the principal avenue in all the great cities of the north west, is a monument of the days of bad government and a primitive commercial system. When banks were few and robbers bold and numerous, men preferred to have some part of their wealth about their persons and in a portable form. A minister at a native court, however rich the harvest he might gather in during the fitful sunshine of royal favour, thought it well to keep a handful of diamonds and rubies in his girdle, as a provision against the day of disgrace and flight. Now, by the help of a bill of exchange and a single trusty agent, he may store up his gains in European stocks and debentures far out of reach of the greediest Nizam or the neediest Maharaja. In like manner, in old times, farmers and shopkeepers were wont to convert their superfluous rupees into ornaments of fantastic design for themselves, their wives, and their children. The unceasing flow of silver towards the east, which affords to political economists a constant sensation of pleasing bewilderment, is attributed in part to the fact that the Indian peasant still continues to invest his earnings on the wrists and ankles, the ears and noses of his family. Cawnpore was noted for the excellence and cheapness of all articles made of leather—saddlery, boots and shoes, bottle-covers, helmets, and cheeroot-cases. The manufacture was introduced by a colony of Chinese, the frugal and industrious Lombards of India, who settled in the Bazaar many years ago. A subaltern could buy a set of harness for his buggy at something under three pounds, and thoroughly equip his hack for half that sum: and, if he was not very particular about shape and colour, he might pick up a serviceable country-bred horse for a hundred rupee note.

      The city had an evil reputation. Situated on the frontier of two distinct jurisdictions, it swarmed with rascals from Oude, on their way to seek obscurity in British territory, and rascals from our north-west provinces, on their way to seek impunity in the dominions of the Nawab. Oonao, the half-way house on the road which led from Cawnpore to Lucknow, gave a name to a class of murders of peculiar atrocity. On and about that highway were constantly found the dead bodies of travellers: sepoys, for the most part, returning to their villages with their savings and the voucher for their pension. In most cases a rope was drawn tightly round the neck: but the surgeons who conducted the inquests gradually came to be of opinion that the victims had been poisoned, or, at any rate, stupefied, by being induced to smoke tobacco mixed with a noxious drug. The police exerted themselves in vain to obtain a clue to the mystery. Whenever a fresh officer of note was appointed to the district, the murderers made a point of presenting him with a "nuzzur," or "offering," in the shape of a larger than usual batch of corpses. The difficulty of detection was increased by an odious custom well known to all Anglo-Indian magistrates, which here flourished with extraordinary vigour. A malicious Hindoo will deliberately mangle the body of a person who has died from a natural cause, and fling it on the ground of some neighbour to whom the scamp may happen to bear a grudge. The unfortunate recipient finds himself involved in the consequences dreaded by the poor people in the Arabian Nights, when the hunchback was choked by a fishbone beneath their hospitable roof.