gun on the ground, though they recovered it a day or two later. The rebels signalised their triumph by setting fire to every building within their reach. They then returned to Sassiah, took a hasty meal, and set off for Dehlí. Arriving there, on the 8th, they were greeted with a grand salute as 'the victors of Sassiah.'
For the English the blow was severe. Though the rebels had departed, their allies, the rabble and the gaol-birds, finished what they had begun. They ruthlessly plundered the city, the cantonments, and the civil lines, burning the materials they cared not to take away. The following morning the town-crier, by order of the Kotwál, proclaimed the inauguration of the rule of the Mughal.
Of Polwhele's battle it only remains to be said that it should stand out in history as a warning of the manner in which Europeans, or, I would rather say, the British race, should not fight Asiatics. From the date following that on which it was fought began, for the English at Agra, that long and tedious life in the fort, which was terminated only by the arrival of a force, under Greathed, on the 10th of October, made disposable by the fall of Dehlí.
In the interval, September the 9th, Mr Colvin died. He was succeeded temporarily, and until the orders of the Government of India should be known, by the senior Civil servant, Mr E. A. Reade, a man of lofty character — the type of a hard-working, unselfish English gentleman. More than two months later (September 30th), the Government, thinking that the times required a soldier rather than a civilian at the head of affairs, nominated Colonel Hugh Fraser of the Engineers to be their Chief Commissioner for Agra and its dependencies. Colonel Fraser held the office till the 9th of February following.
The slight sketch I have given of the proceedings at Agra, till the fall of Dehlí had released avenging columns
