is
not five or six thousand mutinous mercenaries, or ten times the
number, that will change the destiny of England in India. Though we
small fragments of the great machine may fall at our posts, there is
that vitality in the English people that will bound stronger against
misfortunes, and build up the damaged fabric anew."

So far the letter from which we have quoted.--It was not until the 8th
of June that an English force appeared before the walls of Delhi. For
four weeks the mutineers had been left in undisturbed possession of
the city, a possession which was of incalculable advantage to them by
adding to their moral strength the prestige of a name which has always
been associated with the sceptre of Indian empire. The masters of
Delhi are the masters not only of a city, but of a deeply rooted
tradition of supremacy. The delay had told. Almost every day in the
latter half of May was marked by a new mutiny in different military
stations, widely separated from each other, throughout the
North-Western Provinces and Bengal. The tidings of the possession of
Delhi by the mutineers stimulated the daring madness of regiments that
had been touched by disaffection. Some mutinied from mere panic, some
from bitterness of hate. Some fled away quietly with their arms, to
join the force that had now swelled to an army in the city of the
Great Moghul; some repeated the atrocities of Meerut, and set up a
separate standard of revolt, to which all the disaffected and all the
worst characters of the district flocked, to gratify their lust for
revenge of real or fancied wrongs, or their baser passions for plunder
and unmeaning cruelty. The malignity of a subtle, acute,
semi-civilized race, unrestrained by law or by moral feeling, broke
out in its most frightful forms. Cowardice possessed of strength never
wreaked more horrible sufferings upon its victims, and the bloody and
barbarous annals of Indian history show no more bloody and barbarous
page.

The course of English life in those stations where the worst cruelties
and the bitterest sufferings have been inflicted on the unhappy
Europeans has been for a long time so peaceful and undisturbed, it has
gone on for the most part in such pleasant and easy quiet and with
such absolute security, that the agony of sudden alarm and unwarned
violence has added its bitterness to the overwhelming horror. It is
not as in border settlements, where the inhabitants choose their lot
knowing that they