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104  in the Government was gone, while distrust and apprehension took its place instead. And the numerous tribes, according to their several characters, were influenced by seditious excitement, or paralysed by their belief in the awful doom with which they were threatened!

But even at this critical juncture of affairs nothing could have severed the Sepoys from their allegiance to the Government — that is to say, in their own phraseology, they were “true to their salt”; and, with Hindus, this expression implies irrevocable and unswerving fidelity to duty on behalf of those whom they may be serving. And yet, when the Mutiny burst out like a sudden conflagration, and startled India, one of the most popular beliefs about it, and one which has been fostered by many writers, was that it had been brewing and in a state of fermentation for years, and that it was an organised and premeditated rebellion; whereas the revelation of the following facts opposes this fallacious theory, and renders it not only visionary, but stamps the revolt in its suddenness as unpremeditated, and in its alleged “organisation” as the strangest that ever took place. For when a whole army — composed of sappers, artillery, cavalry, and infantry — divides, and subdivides itself, and flocks in thousands, some to Delhi, some to Luknow, some to caste leaders or territorial chiefs, and some again to their peaceful rural homes, where, it may be asked, is the “organisation,” or premeditation discernible in this veritable phenomenal 