referred, the General commanding the Mírath division, General Hewitt, prepared to put into execution the finding of the court-martial on the mutineers of the 3d N. L. C. He ordered a general parade for the morning of the 9th. There were present at that parade at daybreak, a regiment of Carabineers, the 60th Rifles, the 3d Light Cavalry (native), the 11th and 20th regiments N. I., a troop of horse-artillery, and a light field-battery. The condemned mutineers were marched to the ground, were stripped of their accoutrements, then every man was shackled and ironed, and they were all marched to the gaol, a building about two miles distant from the cantonment, and guarded solely by natives. There were sullen looks among the armed troopers of the 3d, and an acute observer might have detected sympathetic glances from the sipáhís. But there was no open demonstration. Like Lord Canning and his advisers after the disarming of the 34th N. I., only three days earlier. General Hewitt and the officers at Mírath congratulated one another on the promptitude and success with which a sharp punishment had been dealt out to men who had defied the authority they had sworn to obey.
But the acts of the 19th N. I. at Barhámpur, of the 34th at Barrackpur, of the men whom Major Cavenagh was carefully watching in Fort William, of the deluded sipáhís near Lakhnao, and of the 7th N. L. C. at Mírath, were but the precursors to a more terrible tragedy. The great movement, of which those acts were only the premonitory symptoms, was, on that 9th day of May, on the eve of its outbreak.
