a livelihood. Now, since personally, and viewed
apart from their husbands, these ladies could have no interest for
the murdering sepoys, it became more and more unintelligible on what
principle, steady motive, or fugitive impulse, these incarnate demons
could persist in cherishing any feeling whatever to those poor, ruined
women, who, when their anchorage should be cut away by the murder of
their husbands, would become mere waifs and derelicts stranded upon
the Indian shores.

These had seemed at first two separate mysteries not less hard to
decipher than the primal mystery of the mutiny itself. But now all
became clear; whatsoever might be the composition, or character, or
final objects of that tyranny which had decoyed the sepoys under its
yoke, one thing was certain--namely, that the childishness and levity
of the Hindoo sepoy made it difficult in excess to gain any lasting
hold over his mind, or consequently to count upon his lasting
services. But to this general difficulty there had now supervened one
signal aggravation, in a shape hateful to those who encountered
it--namely, the attractions of the British service, which service
would be no sooner abjured than it would be passionately regretted.
Here lay the rock which threatened the free movement of the
insurrection. It was evidently determined by those who meant to
appropriate the services of the sepoys, that they should have no
retreat, no opening for recovering a false step, in the well-known
mercy of the British Government. For _them_ it was resolved that there
should be no _locus penitentiae_ left open. In order to close for ever
that avenue to all hope of forgiveness, the misleaders of the soldiery
urged them into those atrocities which every nation upon earth has
heard of with horror. The mere fact of these atrocities indicates at
once the overruling influence of such men as Nena Sahib, determined to
place a bar of everlasting separation between the native army and that
government which might else have reclaimed the erring men, had their
offences lain within the reach of lawful forgiveness. The conspirators
having thus divorced the ruling power, as they idly flattered
themselves, from all martial resources, doubtless assumed the work of
revolution already finished by midsummer-day of this present year. And
this account of the course through which that attempted revolution
travelled--according to which, not the sepoys, who could have had no
ambition such a