22 CAWNPOERE.
oath and salt, to the recollections of bounty-money and the hopes of pension. “ Pity,” writes an officer of the Sixty-fifth reziment, “that Europeans abusing a corps cannot be strung up.” On the twenty-second of May a letter appeared in the Englishman newspaper from Colonel Simpson, who commanded the Sixth Bengal Infantry at the all-important station of Allahabad. He was very indignant at the suspicions which had been expressed concerning the intentions of the men under his charge, who, according to him, ‘evince the utmost loyalty. So far from being mis-“trusted, they are our main protection.” Not many days after he was glad to escape into the fort with a ball through his arm, while his officers were being butchered by the men on whom he had placed so unbounded a reliance. The “staunchness ” of the sepoys was at that time so common a topic with their chiefs that the expression became a byword among Calcutta people; for at whatever station the colonel most loudly, pertinaciously, and angrily declared his regiment to be “staunch,” it was to that quarter that men looked for the next tidings of massacre and outrage. It was not till he saw his own house in flames, and the rupees from the Government treasury scattered broad-cast over the parade-ground-—it was not till he looked down the barrels of sepoy muskets, and heard sepoy bullets whizzing round his ears, that
