Page:The Land of the Veda.djvu/238

228 31st of May; but, thank Heaven! we had been led by a merciful Providence to anticipate the infernal intention, and removed to a place of safety nearly all of those whom they intended to victimize. Alas! for the few women and children who, tardy in their flight, did fall into their fiendish hands on that ever memorable afternoon.

Incendiary fires in the officers' quarters, which Sepoys refused to aid in extinguishing, now became matters of nightly occurrence in different stations. Partial mutinies took place at Fort William, Berhampore, and Lucknow, until, on the 10th of May the three regiments stationed at Meerut (near our position at Bareilly) rose and set fire to the houses, shot some of their officers, and then ruthlessly murdered all the Europeans on whom they could lay their cruel hands, men, women, and children, over forty in number. All this was done in a station where there were European troops within one mile of this scene of blood, and yet the miserable old General who commanded was so stupefied that he would not permit his men either to attack or pursue them! So the Sepoys hurried up their work undisturbed, and marched off to Delhi. They reached that city the next day. Here the other Sepoy troops, five thousand in number, joined them, and, taking their artillery, they proceeded to the palace of the Emperor, where they hauled down the old flag of England, ran up the green standard of the Moslem, and fired a royal salute in honor of the resumption of Mohammedan sovereignty in India. They then began one of the most ruthless and fiendish massacres of the Europeans which even Delhi (the city of cruelty) had ever witnessed. The Shazadahs were foremost in this devilish work, which was done chiefly in public, before thousands of raging foes, at the Kotwallee (Police Station) of the city. All the Europeans within the palace were slaughtered, with the concurrence, if not by the orders, of the Emperor, including the English Embassador, the Chaplain, Mr Jennings and his daughter, and Miss Clifford—the latter said to be one of the most beautiful English ladies then in the East.

Amid the record of these horrors, it makes one feel proud of his Anglo-Saxon blood to think of some of the daring deeds which