the Governor-General issued a
proclamation warning the army of Bengal against the falsehoods that
were being circulated. Mysterious signals, little cakes of unleavened
bread called _chupatties_, were being distributed, as the spring of
1857 went on, throughout the native villages under British rule,
doing the office of the _Fiery Cross_ among the Scotch Highlanders of
an earlier day; and in May the great Mutiny broke out.

Some of the Bengal cavalry at Meerut had been imprisoned for refusing
to use their cartridges; their comrades rose in rebellion, fired on
their officers, released the prisoners, and murdered some Europeans.
The British troops rallied and repulsed the mutineers, who fled to
Delhi, unhappily reached it in safety, and required and obtained the
protection of the feeble old King, the last of the Moguls, there
residing. Him they proclaimed their Emperor, and avowed the intention
of restoring his dynasty to its ancient supremacy. The native troops
in the city and its environs at once prepared to join them; and thus
from a mere mutiny, such as had occurred once and again before, the
rising assumed the character of a vast revolutionary war. For a
moment it seemed that our hard-won supremacy in the East was
disappearing in a sea of blood. The foe were numerous, fanatical, and
ruthless; we ourselves had trained and disciplined them for war; the
sympathies of their countrymen were very largely with them. Yet, with
incredible effort and heroism more than mortal, the small and
scattered forces of England again snatched the mastery from the hands
of the overwhelming numbers arrayed against them.

[Illustration: Sir Colin Campbell.]

One name has obtained an immortality of infamy in connection with
this struggle--that of the Nana Sahib, who by his hideous treachery
at Cawnpore took revenge on confiding Englishmen and women for
certain wrongs inflicted on him in regard to the inheritance of his
adopted father by the last Governor-General. But many other names
have been crowned with deathless honour, the just reward of
unsurpassed achievement, of supreme fidelity and valour, at a crisis
under which feeble natures would have fainted and fallen. Of these
are Lord Canning himself, the noble brothers John and Henry Lawrence,
the Generals Havelock, Outram, and Campbell, and others whom space
forbids us even to name.

The Governor-General remained calm, resolute, and intrepid amidst the
panic and the rage which shook C