A letter from Delhi, written whilst the fight was going on, says: "Women are flying frantically about in all directions, unmolested by our troops, in awful fright; property of great value lying about the streets everywhere, and the enemy in hundreds hurrying away from the doomed city-some say to Gwalior, via Muttra, where, I suppose, they will make another stand. The slaughter of the enemy has been very great; and in the smaller thoroughfares, where our troops had to fight from house to house, the Sepoys fell where they were found, entreating the sahib log (as they called our Europeans) not to give them cold steel, but to shoot them at once. A good deal of skirmishing is going on in the streets, but Pandy don't stand so firmly as people expected; and although the city, which may be supposed was to fall at once into our possession, has taken so long to recover, I think the worst for us is over; and bad enough it is, as far as loss of life is concerned. Many will be glad to learn that women and children are suffered to go unmolested. This is a stretch of mercy I should not have been prepared to make had I a voice in the matter. It ought to be remembered that many of these very women (or fiends in female form) were foremost in inflicting cruelty upon our own women and children; and it must be fresh in your memory, that when the mutineers came out of the city for a grand attack upon our camp, while Nicholson's force was at Nujufghur, they were followed by crowds of these very women, whose sole object on venturing out was to loot our camp when the mutineers took possession of it; which they calculated would be an easy affair, as our troops were away! These Coolie women of Delhi were with the men who looted all the European houses in Delhi. However, it is the general's order that they should be spared-and

In this street warfare, and the arrangement of guns and mortars to shell the palace and Selimgurh, the 15th of September passed over, the rebels still maintaining a heavy cannonade on the English position, from the grand magazine and Selimgurh; while, from the former, the college compound was annoyed by a continued fire of musketry. Skirmishing was also carried on each of the advanced posts, but with little loss on the part of the English. On the 16th, the grand magazine was stormed and taken by Her Majesty's 61st regiment, aided by the 4th Punjab rifles, and a wing of the Belooch battalion. This event was announced to the governor-general in the following telegram:-"Delhi, 16th. Magazine carried this evening with loss of only three wounded. A dash and cheer struck such terror, that the rebels dropped their lighted portfires, leaving their loaded guns an easy prey to us: one hundred and twenty-five pieces of ordnance, and vast supplies of shot and shell, found in the magazine alone. Our guns and ten mortars are now bearing on the palace. We hold everything on our side the canal, except palace. All look to the complete occupation of the city in a couple of days as a certainty." This acquisition put the attacking force in possession of a vast quantity of stores of every description, except powder; and notwithstanding the enormous quantity of shot expended by the rebels during the three preceding months, huge piles, of every calibre, were yet left untouched by them.

In the course of the morning of the 16th the rebel positions at Kissengunge and Taleewarra were abandoned, and five heavy guns belonging to the insurgents. were taken possession of by a party sent out from Hindoo Rao's house for

the purpose. The immense strength of the position occupied by the insurgents in those suburbs was now apparent, and accounted for the check sustained by the 4th column, under Major Reid, on the morning of the assault."

Our last extract from the records of the siege of Delhi tells of an incident much discussed at the time, viz., the execution by Captain Hodson of the fugitive princes, who had escaped from Delhi.

Immediately that the flight of the king and princes became known, Captain Hodson obtained permission to start with his horsemen in pursuit, and came up with the elder of the royal fugitives at Durgah Nizam-oodeen, about six miles from the city. The king was at once summoned to surrender; and, after some negotiation with the begum, his favourite wife, who had accompanied him, and who stipulated for his personal safety as the only condition on which he would return alive to Delhi, Captain Hodson gave his word that the life of the king should be spared. The royal prisoner was then brought forth, and surrendered to his pursuer, who forth with returned to Delhi with his prize. Upon the arrival of the horsemen with their prisoner at the gate of the palace, the men on guard prepared to turn out and salute the party, but were restrained by Captain Hodson, who with a feeling of delicacy imagined the act might be construed by the ex-monarch as one of mockery. The king, with his wife, and her son (a youth of seventeen), with some half-dozen attendants, were then conducted to a small building in the courtyard of the palace, where, under proper guard, they remained until their fate could be decided by a military tribunal.

On the following morning Captain Hodson again started, for the purpose of capturing the fugitive princes, whom he ascertained had taken shelter at the tomb of the emperor Humayoon, near the Cuttub Minar. This active officer,

with one hundred of his men, speedily reached the designated spot, and having taken the necessary measures for preventing any access to or egress from, the building, he ordered one of the illegitimate sons of the king (who had saved his own life by treachery), with a Moulvie, named Rujab Ali (a trusted emissary of the late Sir Henry Lawrence), to bring the princes from their retreat. After a delay of two hours his order was obeyed, and two of the sons and one grandson of the king came out and gave up their swords. They were immediately placed in a carriage, and, surrounded by a guard of forty men, proceeded slowly towards the city. Captain Hodson then, with the remainder of his men, entered the enceinte of the tomb, where he found from five to six thousand of the refuse of the city and palace congregated, and armed with weapons and missiles of all descriptions. Upon his commanding the instant surrender of their arms, several shots were fired, but not one of Hodson's band was hit. The captain sternly reiterated his command, and was about to give his men the order to charge upon the rabble, when the latter began laying down their arms: five hundred swords, one thousand firearms of different sorts, besides horses, elephants, etc., were collected in less than an hour and a-half without a blow being struck. Captain Hodson then rapidly followed the royal prisoners, who had by this time nearly reached Delhi. The carriage had halted, and was surrounded by an immense gathering of people, who turned defiantly upon the troopers as they approached the spot. It was not a moment for hesitation, and the captain at once dashed into the midst of the throng, and in a few but energetic. words, told the people that "those men in the carriage had not only rebelled against the government, but had ordered and witnessed the massacre and shameful exposure of innocent women and children: and thus, therefore," said he,

turning to the carriage with his revolver-"thus, therefore, the government punishes such traitors and murderers." Suiting the action to the word, he shot them instantaneously in succession. The effect upon the rabble was wonderful: not a hand was raised, not a weapon levelled; and the Mahometans of the troop, and some Moulvies among the people, exclaimed, as if by simultaneous impulse, "Well and rightly done: their crimes have met with their just penalty these were they who gave the signal for the death of helpless women and children; and outraged decency by the exposure of their persons; and now a righteous judgment has fallen upon them! God is great!" The crowd then slowly and silently dispersed, and the bodies were conveyed into the city, and thrown out of the carriage, upon the very spot in front of the Khotwallee, where the blood of their victims, a few months previous, had stained the earth. Here the carcasses remained exposed to the gaze of the people until the 24th, when, for sanitary reasons, they were removed, and cast into the river.

There were, of course, a great many subsidiary incidents to these; indeed, the mutiny may be said to resolve itself into a great number of small and almost independent risings; but the incidents we have named are the most prominent, and with the fall of Delhi it may be said that the insurrection ended, though it was not till January, 1859, that "the last gun had been recaptured, and the last fugitive had fled across the frontier."

So much for the external history of the mutiny. We shall now narrate two incidents in it, which, if not themselves historically true, may yet be fitly taken. as pictures of the period. The one is from the relief of Lucknow by Havelock. It is said that when the besieged were fighting for dear life, and quite ignorant that their friends were so near, the approach of these friends was first announced by a Scottish girl called Jessie

But when the far-off dust-cloud

To plaided legions grew,
Full tenderly and blithesomely
The pipes of rescue blew.

Round the silver domes of Lucknow,
Moslem mosque and pagan shrine,
Breathed the air to Britons dearest-
The air of Auld Lang Syne.

O'er the cruel roll of war-drums.
Rose that sweet and homelike strain ;
And the tartan clove the turban,
As the Goomtee cleaves the plain.

Dear to the corn-land reaper
And plaided mountaineer,—
To the cottage and the castle
The pipers' song is dear.
Sweet sounds the Gaelic pibroch
O'er mountain, glen, and glade;
But the sweetest of all music

The pipes at Lucknow played!

The other incident which the set of engravings accompanying this article is intended to illustrate, is one of a large group of what we may call family tragedies, which occurred during the mutiny.

About this period a young English captain of the name of Hamilton was stationed at a small military fort in the North-West provinces. With him there was a considerable body of Sepoys, and a small force of English soldiers. The members of his family were himself, his wife, and wife's sister, and his two little children.

Their chief attendant was a native servant of uncommon ability, in whom they all placed the greatest confidence. In reality, he was one of those most bitterly hostile to the English rule, and, besides, he had contracted an intense hatred to the whole family whom he nominally served. The special reason of this was that Hamilton, who was a man of a very generous nature, but of a very hasty temper, had one day found, or imagined that he found, him remiss in the performance of some household duty. In a sudden passion of rage he struck him somewhat severely, and the blow was never forgotten nor forgiven. Palit-such

was the name of the native servant-was quickly aware of the first stirring of the mutiny, and he threw himself heart and soul into the movement. It afforded him the best possible opportunity for revenge. Circumstances favoured his plans.

Hamilton suddenly received orders to march against a distant hill-tribe, whose depredations had very much troubled. the dwellers in the adjacent valleys. He took with him the greater part of the garrison of the fort-in fact, almost all the Sepoys, as well as some of the Europeans. These Sepoys were profoundly disaffected, though, with true Oriental dissimulation, they were able so skilfully to conceal their real feelings, that Hamilton-reckless and confiding by nature suspected absolutely nothing. Palit and the native officers so arranged matters that all the natives well affected to the British remained behind.

Hamilton took a kindly farewell of his family, and set out for his distant expedition. Things at the fort proceeded for a month or so in that eventless, languid manner with which existence. moves on at a lonely "station" in India. Then alarming rumours began to arrive of the rising of the natives in all the surrounding districts; and one fearful evening a solitary horseman, almost dead with fatigue and loss of blood from numerous wounds, rode wearily into the fort, and announced that the Sepoys of Hamilton's band had suddenly risen during the night, murdered all the other Europeans, and dangerously wounded him, who, by what seemed a very miracle, had escaped with his life. They were now marching back with the avowed intention of destroying the fort, and murdering all its inhabitants. A few days after, and the place was surrounded by its former garrison, now thirsting for the lives of their former comrades. The beleaguered, on their part, were determined to sell their lives as dearly as possible. In surrender, at any rate, they well knew there was no hope of safety.