Page:Life in India or Madras, the Neilgherries, and Calcutta.djvu/482

422 the water-girt fortress of Seringapatam. The city was besieged, its walls were breached, and, led on by General Baird, who had himself been a prisoner within the dungeons of the "city of Sri-Runga," the English and allied Hindu troops carried the place by storm. Tippoo, sallying out, with hereditary valour, to meet the victors, fell pierced by two musketballs. An English soldier seized the swordbelt, glittering with jewels, which surrounded the sultan's waist; but the prince's sword was still grasped in his stiffening hand, and with it he wounded the plunderer. The enraged soldier, not knowing his enemy, shot him through the head, and Tippoo was no more. Thus a dynasty set, as it rose, in blood; and thus was the saying of our Lord fulfilled: "He that taketh the sword shall be slain by the sword."

Seringapatam, no longer a metropolis, and scourged by fevers, is going to decay. Its ramparts are in ruins, and its cannon have been tumbled into the moat. The stranger, dreading the miasma which floats in its atmosphere, rarely spends a night within its walls. He stops to gaze at the magnificent tombs of Hyder and his son, in the beautiful Lal Bagh,