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would not sell, consigning their cargoes to the deep, and the crabs and the codlings and the podlies-a sad waste when one remembers how many starve. The rings rattle on the mast, the sail shakes into lurks and sinks, the chain rasps out, the anchor grips, and we ride at our holding- ground. Anon farewells, the cobble, the shore, which seems to sway beneath our feet, and last, but not least, the breakfast and the bed.

One yarn alone may be spun, and it is a true yarn, though so many have derided it that one scarce cares to be again dubbed a Yankee or worse!

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and not till she had run into the little bay was the mystery explained. In the nets a white dolphin, eight feet long, and of a mighty girth and strength, had become entangled. His captors found that by hitching a rope round his tail, he-or was it she?-could be made to tow the skiff, and not only so, but by making traction, first on one side of the flukes and then on the other, the desired direction could be compassed. The dolphin's vigour was exactly proportionate to the novel task, for the strange tug expired from exhaustion and perchance chagrin after doing all that was required of it. The ropes had cut deeply into the flesh at the root of the tail, and the iron doubtless had entered its soul. Sic transit gloria. The dolphin was more famous in death than in life, like Samson of old.

The lazy shore - folk were washing and shaving and blinking as we climbed the brae, and after the long cold night at sea it was heartsome to smell the resin in the firs, and get a whiff of air perfumed with the heather honey, and hearken to the merry madrigal of warblers in the woods.

A MEMORY AND A STUDY OF THE INDIAN MUTINY.

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BY MAJOR-GENERAL W. TWEEDIE, C.S.I.

AMONG the many "Reminiscences and "Personal Narratives" of the Sepoy War, or great Indian Mutiny, which have appeared in the magazines and in none more notably than in 'Blackwood' -I have seen no contribution having as its special subject the breaking into mutiny of the native troops at Benares on the 4th of June 1857. The story has of course been told by Sir John Kaye, and in less detail by other writers. But accounts compiled from the statements of others may still leave room for the representations of eye-witnesses; and as it befell me when a very young soldier to be severely wounded in the émeute now referred to, I desire to set down some recol

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I. BEFORE THE ÉMEUTE.

The name Benares, like the name Mesopotamia, is one of those which are "familiar in Our mouths as household words," and yet there can be no harm in mentioning that it stands for an extremely ancient and "holy" city of the Hindus, having some 200,000 inhabitants, and situated on a fine sweep of the Ganges, about 400 miles from Calcutta. In the opposite direction, that is, towards Cawnpore and Delhi, the nearest important place is

Allàhàbàd. If Benares had fallen, nothing could have saved the great fortress of Allahabad; and with that lost to us, as it very nearly was, the most sanguine might well have desponded. The lion and the lamb in British India, however much they may love one another, do not lie down together; and so, when the Benares district was ceded to the E. I. Company in 1773, our civil and military establishments were planted at a distance of about three miles

inland from the riverside city, on one of those extensive plains which are held to possess a special value as non-conductors of political electricity. Within the British position the civilians and the soldiers occupied separate lines or precincts. All the usual public buildings proper to the head-quarters of a revenue division under the Lieutenant-Governorship of the North-West Provinces made up the civil lines; with numerous more or less palatial villas embosomed in foliage, the private residences of members of the administration. The military cantonment was even more mixed and straggling. On the side next the parade - ground, this large area was fringed with soldiers' quarters, not "barracks" in our sense, but long lines of earthen huts in which the lordly sepoy, having scrupulously deposited his womankind in some far-away village, led his life in cenobitic fashion. Between these lines and the parade-ground there stood in a row, at intervals, a number of small masonry turrets called "Bells of arms," in which the sepoys, when dismissed from drill or duty, were required to lodge their "brown Bess muskets. Other parts of the same picture were: Similar lines for a second regiment of native infantry; lines for a risàla of native horsemen, with horses picqueted under trees in the open; sheds for guns and gun- waggons, with barracks for a handful of British gunners; hospital accommoda

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tion of the antediluvian pattern; quartermasters' and commissariat "godowns"; and, most picturesque of all, spacious straw-yards for artillery bullocks. The mention of these unwarlike ruminants takes us back to the days of Sir Charles Napier. Like many another old warrior whose introduction to Anglo-Indian methods and equipments had happened late in life, Sir Charles always looked a little dubiously on the use of horned cattle for ar

tillery purposes in the presence of the enemy. When commander-in-chief of the Indian army he was waited on one day by an officer who was under orders to join a bullockbattery of the Gwalior Contingent; and the idea of the bullocks so upset his official gravity that he playfully advised his visitor to exchange some of them for cows, to give him milk and butter! respectable quadrupeds under mention have had their day in India as combatants, that day was at least a good one. They certainly helped to win and keep the Company's empire. Nobody ever saw a milch-cow among them; but their flesh could supply undeniable rations. The finest beef that I ever tasted came off the bones, and more particularly off the humps, of the grain-fed bullocks which, after drawing Havelock's and Outram's into the Lucknow Residency, were slaughtered to feed the garrison. To return, however, to the bullock - lines of pre

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1 Anglicised form of Indian gàdang, a place for the storage of goods.

No attempt will here be made to discuss at large the cause or causes of the Mutiny. These pages, as will soon appear, are written under the firm conviction, the fruit of forty years of thought and study, that the sepoy revolt had its direct and immediate origin in a stupendous blunder, productive of a gross misunderstanding; the blunder being that of the military authorities in suffering hog's lard and cow's fat to be used in the manufacture of

Mutiny Benares. All the several lines and quarters of which these formed an outlying portion presented, as will readily be understood, a pretty considerable frontage, through which ran numerous approaches to the thatched bungalows of the British officers of regiments and departments, to the teeming bàzàrs replete with foodstuffs, and to a few public buildings. All this was in excellent keeping with the main idea of the Company's military policy, which was, a certain new kind of cartridge, to hold India unostentatiously and inexpensively, by means of native levies only slightly supported by white troops. The fly in the pot of honey was, that not only was the British quarter as a whole unprotected by the smallest piece of circumvallation or intrenchment, but that nowhere within the enceinte was there any defensible work whatever. When the Mutiny cloud was at its blackest, a certain building called the Mint was fixed on, at the instance of two civilians, as the place of refuge in an emergency. In some respects this building was well adapted to the end in view. Its grounds were walled in; and it contained many fine rooms and spaces, including a substantial flat roof for sleeping on at night. But to some it looked like a death-trap, because it stood near a bàzàr, and was surrounded with trees, and with other houses, in a manner unfavourable to artillery fire. The use that was made of the Mint will appear in the sequel. Mercifully its powers of resistance were never tested.

the pig being taboo to the Moslem, and the cow a kind of goddess to the Hindu; and the misunderstanding, that of the sepoys in seeing in this a deeply laid stratagem devised with the object of turning them into renegades and outcasts, ready to live on pork and beef rations, and cross the kàla pàni or black water. Undoubtedly there existed at the same time many subsidiary causes. The most important was the policy already noticed, of trying to hold India with far too few British soldiers. Next to that, perhaps, was the flagrant error, which had hardened before the Mutiny into a system, of appointing to important commands men whose exploits belonged to ancient history, and whom age was clawing in its clutches.

At least one other facilitating cause of the Mutiny will appear hereafter. The present slight and cursory allusion to a complex subject is merely suggested by the absolutely open state of the cantonment and station of Benares in the day of need.

Does the same condition exist merit of which was that it still? it may be wondered. The could easily be converted from times are changed, no doubt; a two-seated carriage into a and India is hardly likely ever kind of bedstead. Every apto see such another crisis. But plicant for a carriage had to every régime and every epoch await his turn, and in my has its own perils. As Iago case this meant a fortnight's said, "There are many events halt in Calcutta. During that in the womb of time which will time I was the guest of an be delivered." And if one of eminent Scottish missionary, the lessons of 1857 was "make at whose house some of the no terms," "no surrender," leading Hindus were frequent another lesson was "6 'fortify.' visitors. Just then the story On the 4th of March 1857, of the "greased cartridge" was soon after nightfall, when the in every mouth; men's talk, sultry air was aglow with fire- however restrained, always flies, Calcutta received me, a seemed to turn on some aplad of twenty. Promotion from proaching collision; and it is cadet to ensign on the Com- not too much to say that Calpany's Bengal establishment cutta, driven out of its sober followed directly, coupled with senses by the wildest rumours, an order to proceed to Benares was giving way overmuch to and "do duty" with the 37th panic. Early in March, the Native Infantry. The railway youthful prince of Gwalior, system projected by the splendid his Highness Mahàràjà Sindgenius of Lord Dalhousie was hià, made his appearance in as yet in an early stage. The Calcutta; and one day his East Indian railway which was exceedingly astute prime minto connect Calcutta with the ister, Ràjà Dinkar Rào, acNorth-West Provinces stopped companied by the Governorshort of the Bengal frontier, General's agent for the states and the bearing of this fact on of central India, called by the Mutiny is obvious. The appointment on my well-inwell-appointed mail coach, formed friend the missionary. changing its teams before What passed did not transpire. smiling village hostelries, has But twenty years later, when never been seen in India. Be- the same Sindhià still held fore the birth of railways the sway in Gwalior, it fell to my natives tramped the roads lot to be appointed Political singly or in parties, or rode on Agent at his capital, and one bullocks, on "cuddies," or on day, in a moment of confidence, diminutive ponies, or went jing- his Highness introduced the ling along in primitive vehicles. subject of his visit to Calcutta The European, when in a hurry, in the Mutiny year. The engaged from the postal de- rumour, he said, was at the partment a one-horse convey- time running like wild-fire ance called a dák - gàrl, the over his territory that Queen

1 Qu., Is this the Indian "gadha," brought our way by the gypsies?

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