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Rh  was penned by the generous hand of that illustrious Viceroy of India, Earl Canning of immortal memory, who, in bidding farewell to the Corps in such laudatory terms, has left no ordinary record of the men who voluntarily, at all personal risks, and at all personal sacrifices, rallied round him in the tremendous Imperial crisis through which India had commenced to pass; and who in those critical days of immeasurable anguish, when no Englishman in the Upper Provinces could call his life his own, stood by him in behalf of the endangered Empire — not when succour had arrived from England, and British bayonets were gleaming over the country, but in the darkest hour of trial, when the gloom of despondency and despair hung like a pall over the Bengal Presidency, and the fiendish massacres of innumerable English families, had made Upper India like a vast Christian charnel-house.

Furthermore, the Viceroy, in thus generously recording the meritorious and splendid services rendered by this little band of devoted Volunteers, was doubtless influenced by the remembrance of the exceptional ordeals through which they had passed while aiding in the suppression of the Mutiny. For he well knew and could speak of their days of trial, of nights of anxiety, of hardships encountered, of dangers vanquished, of sufferings borne with heroic fortitude, such as none except those who had themselves experienced them could understand.

Above all — how far above, words silenced by sorrow cannot say — he was aware of the sad fact that a 