Pent up within our battlements,
We seem as living dead.

No news from the outer world!
Have British soldiers quailed
Before the rebel mutineers?--
Has British valour failed?

If the foregoing facts do not convince my readers of the truth of the
origin of _Jessie's Dream_ I cannot give them any more. I am positive on
the point that the Seventy-Eighth Highlanders _had_ their bagpipes and
pipers with them in Lucknow, and that I first heard the story of
_Jessie's Dream_ on the 23rd of November, 1857, on the Dilkoosha heights
before Lucknow. The following is my letter of the 18th of October, 1891,
on the subject, addressed to the editor of _The Calcutta Statesman_.

SIR,--In an issue of the _Statesman_ of last week
there was a letter from Deputy-Inspector-General Joseph Jee,
V.C., C.B., late of the Seventy-Eighth Highlanders
(Ross-shire Buffs), recopied from an English paper,
contradicting a report that had been published to the
effect that the bagpipes of the Seventy-Eighth had been left
behind at Cawnpore when the regiment went with General
Havelock to the first relief of Lucknow; and I write to
support the assertion of Deputy-Inspector-General Jee that
if any late pipe-major or piper of the old Seventy-Eighth
has ever made such an assertion, he must be mad! I was not
in the Seventy-Eighth myself, but in the Ninety-Third, the
regiment which saved the "Saviours of India" (as the
Seventy-Eighth were then called), and rescued them from the
Residency, and I am positive that the Seventy-Eighth had
their bagpipes and pipers too inside the Residency; for I
well remember they struck up the same tunes as the pipers of
the Ninety-Third, on the memorable 16th of November, 1857. I
recollect the fact as if it were only yesterday. When the
din of battle had ceased for a time, and the roll of the
Ninety-Third was being called outside the Secundrabagh to
ascertain how many had fallen in that memorable combat,
which Sir Colin Campbell said had "never been surpassed and
rarely equalled," Pipe-Major John McLeod called me aside to
listen to the pipers of the Seventy-Eighth, inside the
Residency, playing _On wi' the Tartan_, and I could hear the
pipes quite distinctly, although, except for the practised
_lug_ of John McLeod, I could not have told the