28 CAWNPORE.
“ever been at Battses’ Hotel, Vere Street, Oxford “Street, they would not have come on so boldly.” On inquiry, it appeared that this judicious Punjabee had gone to London in the service of some Anglo-Indian ; where, as he stood at the mouth of Vere Street, he might see passing to and from Hyde Park in a single day as many Sahibs as would stock two such towns as Loodianah or Umritsur.
The conviction that all our available male population was already in India began to be shaken as, regiment after regiment, brigade upon brigade, angry fighting men of Saxon race came pouring up from Calcutta in a continuous stream, by road, by rail, and by river. And yet that conviction lingered long. When the magnificent array collected for the final siege of Lucknow passed through Cawnpore, our Sikh allies would have it that Sir Colin, like the stage manager at Astley’s theatre, marched his men in at one end of the town and out at the other, and then brought them back outside the walls to repeat the same manoeuvre. When the mutineers first caught sight of the Highland costume, they cried with joy that the men of England had been exhausted, and that the Company had been reduced to call out the women. They soon had reason to repent their mistake, and thenceforward adopted a theory more consistent with the fact, for they held that the
