for the remainder of the night on the European parade ground.
For the residents at Mírath, for the women, the children the civil section of the Europeans and Eurasians, that night was full of horror. The scum of the native population and the unchained gaol-birds had the field to themselves. Most thoroughly did they do their congenial work. The Commissioner, Mr Greathed, warned first by an officer of the 3d Native Cavalry, and afterwards by an Afghán pensioner, had, with his wife and other English women, taken refuge on the terraced roof of his house. Against a foe whose weapon was fire that terrace was no sure hiding-place. But for the fidelity — I am happy to add, the by no means rare fidelity — of his native servants he and those with him must have perished in the flames. One servant in particular distinguished himself. He persuaded the rabble to move off to search for his master in an outhouse some distance off, and during their sudden absence Greathed, his friends and family, had time to descend from their perilous position and crouch in the empty garden. Others were less fortunate. Wives, left without protection during the enforced absence of their husbands, were butchered without mercy, and children were slaughtered under the very eyes of their mothers. Many instances of the devotion and presence of mind of English women could be given if space permitted. Those who did escape owed their safety to the possession of these qualities, but the roll of those who suffered was a long one. When day at length dawned, it dawned over a dismantled Mírath. The English men and women who had been saved crept from their hiding-places to see, in the mangled corpses which lay by the wayside, in the blackened ruins of houses, in the furniture of European make thrown out of the dwelling-houses, smashed and destroyed, abundant evidence of the
