Page:The Land of the Veda.djvu/320

310 what it were well could the outraged earth have hidden—the inner apartment was almost ankle deep in blood! The plaster all around was scored with sword-cuts, not high up, as where men had fought, but low down, and around the corners, as if a creature had crouched there to avoid the blow. Fragments of dresses, large locks of hair, broken combs, with three or four Bibles and Prayer Books, and children's little shoes, were scattered around. Alas! it was thirty-six hours too late! The Well beside the House held what they had marched and fought so hard to save, and marched and fought in vain. They had to leave them as they found them; so they filled up the well and leveled the earth about it. Over that well a weeping country has erected a graceful shrine, and has turned the ground around it into a fair garden, and made the whole forever sacred to their memory. We present views of the outside and inside of the shrine, engraved from photographs taken on the spot. Around the rim of the stone covering the well's mouth is this inscription:

“”

Over the door outside are the words of the one hundred and forty-first Psalm, “Our bones are scattered at the grave's mouth, as when one cutteth and cleaveth wood upon the earth.”

The garden, inclosed, planted, and made so lovely, with the monument in the center, is now such a contrast in its peace and beauty to the sorrows once endured within its limits, that one is reminded of the words which Havelock's men cut on the temporary monument of wood which they placed over the well: “I believe in the resurrection of the body.” The entire premises have been placed by Government under the appropriate guardianship of Private Murphy—one of the three survivors of that fearful siege—and here he may be seen daily, accompanying visitors from many lands, who with sad thoughts and respectful steps approach the Ladies' Monument in the Memorial Garden of Cawnpore.