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latter. At Meerut the plot was concocted with | regularity and system. The insurrection occurred during public worship. Several officers belonging to the native regiments of infantry and a cavalry regiment were shot by their men while attempting to arrest the outbreak. The European soldiers in the station fired upon the mutineers. The conflict was very short and the latter fled out of town followed by the dragoons, who cut down numbers of them by the way. The greater part contrived to escape unfortunately by the Delhi road, and reached that city, a distance of forty miles. Delhi is the old capital of the Moguls, and was the centre of the Mussulman empire and power. It cannot, therefore, be regarded with fervour by the Hindoos; yet the mutineers, being joined by three native regiments stationed there, gained possession of the city, and murdered all the Europeans who were unable to escape in time. The artillery, on whose fidelity reliance has always been placed, joined the mutiny under a stipulation for the safety of their European officers. One report states that they considered themselves unable to resist, and made the best terms in their power. The banks were robbed of bullion to the value of one million pounds sterling, according to one report; and fifteen lacs of rupees, or one hundred and fifty thousand pounds, according to others. The more moderate sum is likely to be correct.

The magazine would have been secured by the mutineers except for the chivalric devotion of one European officer. One report states that he exploded this magazine to prevent the employment of its contents by the rebels. Another that he waited Sampson-like until the magazine was crowded with mutineers, and then exploded the contents, scattering death around him; and that, although greatly scorched, yet he escaped with life. This Curtian act was worthy of Rome in the best days of the republic.

The conduct of the mutinied Sepoys in Delhi was disgraceful. All the Europeans whom they could reach were slain without any distinction of age or sex. The property accumulated by Europeans was destroyed. A reign of terror prevailed in that old city where, until a few days previously, European families considered themselves no less safe than in Birmingham or Manchester.

The city had not been recaptured when the mail left Bombay, but a terrible retribution will be enacted there, If the commanding officers had shot fifty or even ten men of the 19th and 34th Regiments, some weeks previous to these events, they would have been censured bitterly at home. Meetings might even have been called to resolve that they should be impeached, and yet that austere course would have been real and substantial mercy. It would have prevented these revolts, and would

have saved five thousand lives.

The immediate duties of the Government cannot be discussed with advantage in this place. They must be already completed, if the men be equal to the work. Reinforcements should be sent by the

overland route, to the extent of the available shipping at Suez. The monsoon will not interfere materially with their progress eastward; and the steamers for Australia, as they arrive at Suez, should be ordered round by Bombay or Madras with European soldiers.

The difficulties will not be entirely overcome by these steps; for, although two European regiments-the 64th and 78th Highlanders—had arrived at Bombay from the Persian expedition; yet they were shipped to Calcutta, round the whole peninsula of India, and may arrive there after a voyage of several weeks. When they have reached Calcutta, they will only have gained the navigation to Delhi. They will not be nearer to that city by any important distance than in Bombay; and they would not arrive before its walls, under three to four weeks of further boating and steaming.

The Government have been warned that railways were not more necessary for peace than for warfor cotton than for soldiers. They have had surveys for several years, capital subscribed, and money ready to be paid; labour abundant, and workmen anxious for wages. The delay on this subject is a mystery. It is not chargeable on the Indian Railway Companies, for they have been anxious to proceed. It remains altogether chargeable either upon the Board of Control or the East India Company, or divisible between those parties. Last month it was a blunder for which one or both sets of officials were culpable. This month it is a crime for which one or both are responsible. The time may be come now when progress is not probable. Railways cannot be made during a period of suspicion and a state of war. Still these commotions, desperate as is their beginning, may be soon extinguished, and the people at home are entitled to ask that Indian interests be not left to the management of blundering persons, who sleep over common business, until they are awakened by the shouts of revolt.

The transition state of India obviously requires care in the selection of the native soldiers. The mutineers of Meerut urged native regiments in Delhi to join them, because the Government had endeavoured to convert them to Christianity. The Government has abstained very wisely from propagandism; but it has also suppressed many observances, cruel, immoral, and vicious in their character; which were connected with the religion of the high caste Hindoos. Farther, it cannot prevent the progress of Christianity; yet that very desirable object may for a time rouse the animosity of the priests and the fanaticism of the soldiers, if the authorities persist in the enlistment of high caste men. The newspapers state that the local government of Bombay places per fect confidence in its sturdy little low caste sepoys, The Government of Bengal recruited, we suspect, from high caste men. The low caste sepoy has nothing to lose by the substitution of Christianity for Hindooism. Human nature has several com

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HOW TO REMEDY THE EVIL.

mon traits in all countries and among all races. The low caste men know that they are degraded, despised, and trampled down among the social mud of the native religion, which is aristocratic, exclusive, and hereditary in all its presumed privileges. They cannot be expected to give them selves much trouble for its maintenance, and they are less liable, therefore, to be drawn by the priesthood into temptation.

The British service enables them for the first time in their lives to hold up their heads among their neighbours. It suppresses all the invidious distinctions to which they have been accustomed for their lives, as their ancestors were for ages. Its pay enriches them and gives them the hope of wealth and the certainty of competence. The native officers are well paid men. The 9th native regiment had shewn great fidelity at one station, and a particular native officer was named as personally deserving of some substantial mark of favour. His European commanding officer recommended that his present pay of eighty rupees per month or £96 per annum should be raised to one hundred rupees per month or £120 per annum. That sum to a native Hindoo of the labouring classes, and especially of a low caste, is fabulous wealth. The native officer may value his wages, but this particular person would probably value more the Victoria Cross which the Queen can now bestow on deserving men who serve under her flag. Too few decorations or honours have been scattered among the great army of India. One native officer, a man of great information, and who occupied a very different position from that of a soldier, always being to a considerable extent a diplomatic person, lives in this country, who twice saved the life of the late Sir Charles Napier in battle. What has been his reward? Why, nothing, except a shabby deprivation of his property, or at least of his position, upon the most paltry ground that could be advanced, namely, that he had made money and was rich. Conduct of this character makes discontent, and if the Bengal army is to be trusted hereafter the reward of good service should not be less certain than the retribution of revolt.

The Europeans serving the Company in India, must be greatly increased in numbers, both officers and soldiers. The officers allowed to each native corps are too weak in numbers, and cannot possibly exercise the controul over their men which is desirable for good discipline. The European soldiers, in the direct service of the Company, are not more numerous now perhaps, than they were when the land to be held was not half so long or so wide. The Company, indeed, pay for the regiments of the royal army in their employment during their service in, and transit to and from, India, but the British army, in its ordinary state, is unable to meet emergencies. The Anglo-Indians ask twenty regiments at this moment, of whom one half are required by the overland route. That number can scarcely be spared from the ordinary

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service of the country, and will leave it indiscreetly weak in men. The East Indian service must employ therefore, that additional force of Europeans, permanently. They cannot leave a great city like Delhi, with its bank and bullion, its magazine and powder, exclusively garrisoned by the native soldiers. The latter may be safely trusted in the field, when they cannot be so securely trusted in a garrison.

The difficulties that once existed against the employment of a large European force, would be felt no longer if India were managed by practical men. Railways are planned to the sanitoria of the Himalayas. The chief stations of the European army could be planted in these healthy districts, within a few days' drive of any city in India.

The interests dependent upon the good government of Hindostan—and we have greater interests than the natives in that achievement-require the introduction of European capital and skill. Safety from outrage, either by Santhal or by Sepoy is absolutely and perfectly requisite to obtain that result. The great land questions of India require re-assortment; and if that country is to become the rival of the United States in the production of cotton; of Russia, in corn and flour; of Australia, in wool; of Cuba, in sugars, and of other tropical lands in all tropical produce, it needs the help of European skill in agriculture, supported by European energy and money. For this purpose the Company should not oppose, but promote the introduction of European zemindars, if not upon the plains of the Ganges, certainly upon the slopes of the Himalayas, to whom long leases, or perpetual leases, at low rents of extensive tracts of land should be conceded, who might become the planters, or the squires, of India, as they found it to be most profitable. We do not know that the banks of the Ganges or the Indus present any obstacle to European settlement greater than existed, or seemed to exist, in the southern States of America, or in the western isles of the Atlantic; but, certainly, the great uplauds of the Himalayas girding round the peninsula on every side, almost from the mouth of the Indus to the root of the Malay peninsula, present no sanatory obstructions.

At one time the East India Company opposed the introduction of Europeans, with the purpose of permanent settlement, upon the opinion that they might tread upon Hindoo prejudices. These days are past. Hindoo prejudices will be trodden upon. That occurrence cannot be long postponed, in any part of the country. It is not even desirable that it should be prevented. Therefore the land must be held by the strong arm; and guided by the gentle hand; until its resources are elicited, and its native wealth freed from those trammels that have bound both land and people in a maze of ignorance and superstition for ages, until amid the wealth of the former, its inhabitants are chiefly and permanently poor; and vast regions have been devastated often by hopeless famine.

THE ROADS THROUGH THE WORLD.

CHAPTER XXIII.

TO THE SOUTH.

Nox erat, et cælo fulgebat Luna sereno

Inter minora sidera.

THUS Horace began his fifteenth ode, and as it was partly on his account that I was doomed to expatriation, or, in a more limited sense to exparochialism, it is legitimate to take this rounda-corner-way of saying, that "it was a quiet moonlight night."

In these days people did not travel very fast, and we were to make some advance on this evening, that we might start from a certain point early next morning, to be at another given stage before the shades of that evening fell over, to me, an unknown region; and so on for the next day.

I had Mr. Green for a travelling companion, and there was no probability of our falling out by, or losing, the way, for he was familiar with every turn. I almost felt dowie and downcast when we passed the last house of the village, as might have been expected reasonably, for I had no such predilection to study as at all compensated for the sacrifice that was being made of me on its account,

It was moonlight when we commenced our journey; the sky was blue and clear, the clouds that floated here and there on the edge of the horizon, were light and white little fragments of clouds, that took fanciful and strange shapes sometimes like boats or ships floating over a summer sea, and the stars were very few number, and rather weak. In course of our journey we came to the large oak tree, under which David Robertson found the children on the night of winter in which their mother perished among the snow. Some of the trees were bare of leaves even at this season, and we could see the lights from Blinkbonnie, some way above the trees on the other side of the water, for the house stood high. The moon's rays brightly sparkled upon a deep pool of water, over which there rose a black, tall shadow; but at this hour it seemed as if the moon had just risen for the purpose of looking into and through that water, and cast, therefore, no light whatever on the southern crag and trees. This pot was in a straight line between the oak and the house of Blinkbonnie, and it was the Drover's Pot. Mr. Green made some pretence of looking back to the village, which must have been a pretence, for it was a good way above the bend on which Blinkbonnie stands; and we were far beneath that now, so that we could not even see the reek from the chimneys. I looked back too; not that I needed to refresh my mind with another lingering look at the hills and the water, but perhaps by way of sympathy, which

often leads even men to do what others are doing. It seemed to me that Mr. Green, like myself, was inclined verily to weep, although others were there who were to accompany us, at least down to the town; and yet there was no particular reason in his case, for he was only a stranger, and as it might be said a wayfaring man, who had tarried among us for short seasons; and one also who had come of years, and might be supposed to have been hardened to "flittings," which to me then were a very desecration of the inner heart's inner feelings, since I had made companionship with every bush, and friends in every brake; and was not in the mood of making new acquaintances, even if that had been possible in every instance; but although new scenery, new flowers, and trees, and streams, new houses, and new living people may take the place of old in the heart, it is not possible that old graves can ever have a rival there. The associations and the memories connected with them never flit.

To that hour it had never occurred to me, in a clear and intelligible form, that in Mr. Green I had a rival in my remembrance of Nancy Rose; and it did not occur until many thousands of hours there. after, and when it was made evident, it was also made obvious that the rivalry could never have been productive of serious results; for, of course, my feelings towards the dead lady must have run entirely in a different channel from those of a person who was by some short time her senior in the world.

The time of which I write is not so very long ago in-and yet even then our country superstitions and traditions chimed in harmony with, what I afterwards learned to be consistent with reason and even with revelation, in some shape or form. They were poetry, and that will nearly always be natural, and often true. Thus, without any nervous dread of kirkyards, or those who were stored up in them, since I lived almost in one, the dead were not to my mind removed a great distance. Not having learned yet to consider space as a meaningless word, in certain circumstances. I thought of them as merely changed, living still near by their old haunts, floating in the summer air or the winter storm, but feeling neither the one nor the other in the way that we feel them. With this belief, not in the shape of disputation or doubt, but simply as a belief, Blinkbonnie, and even the Drover's Pot, were to me, in a subordinate sense, as hallowed ground; at least nearly as much hallowed as the memory that was wrapped around them--that was their spirit to mine. Therefore, I understood the old Latin poet's words better than formerly, those words in which he said how pleasant a thing it was to have a solitude wherein to weep.

Another view of the case grew clear to me then.

EDINBURGH.

The house was now again inhabited. It had been bought and furnished for the unprovided aud the young. Light steps were morn and even upon its stairs, and bright eyes glanced from its windows, brighter far than its dazzling lights on winter evenings. A home had to be made for them, and we know nothing of where our roads through the world are to lead us, at least in the world. Mr. Rose was journeying from the east to meet his daughter. That was his road, and he was never to meet her. His daughter was walking up and down, to and from, her future home, making it ready for him, but she was never to dwell there, or to see him in this life. There were little feet running here and there, to meet him of whom he never thought; and she was preparing a home for them, whom she never saw, and who knew her not. When the time came, her walk ceased; among other reasons that they might have more room in that large house, and that it might be theirs.

And so I journeyed on, having folded out another roll of the history in my own mind, and satisfied myself more than formerly, that it was all very right. For some time after that winternight's storm and its consequences, that is to say, for some time after I knew them-it need not be concealed that I cherished a kind of animosity towards the little orphans, entirely circumstantial, and owing to their possession of a place, that it seemed to me never could be, and never should have been occupied; but that vanished, whether from a more reasonable view of the matter, or their own influence, for they were kindly children, loving all that should be loved, as if they followed the footprints of their predecessor, signifieth not, and is not very clear.

Their whole history to this period of their lives was very odd and singular. Their bringing toge ther of the associations of the old owner; and the claims of the new owner upon Blinkbonnie; their weary road from the American lakes to the Scotch water side; their sudden lift from the very depths of calamity and misfortune to comparative comfort and even wealth; the death of their mother within sight of the home aud almost on the very land that had been once her husband's, and would have been her own by a chain of circumstances unconnected with him, and while she went mournfully on her way, deeming herself and his children but outcasts from their ancestral home-were all stronger circumstances than one could find in a novel.

Then that one road in life had to close beneath the huge oak tree, for if it had run over a little farther it seems certain or probable that old Mr. Rose would not have had the lightsome home of his old age, after he had contented himself with the thought that he must die alone: would not have had around him when he passed out of the world those loving hearts and soft hands that closed his eyes, when death crossed over his face, and his long life was ended; and round his grave there could not have come, as there came, young mourners to tend

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and water the soil that lay above him and he could not have gone away with just so perfect confidence as he had that everything he said would be done to the very letter, from the grass and oats for his ponies, to the pensions for his servants,-nor could he have felt in his last years the pleasure that he had in building or buying up the old estate to something like the importance it had in the county before the madness of spending got into the old family.

It seems to me, moreover, except for this event, that all the plans and projects commenced by Nancy Rose would have perished or fallen into decrepitude; for Mrs. Doctor More grew aged and frail, and died at last, and no other lady seemed able to take her place, except the young orphans, whom she sheltered, when David Robertson took them from beside their dead mother beneath the old oak tree.

It may seem strange that I have never mentioned the family name of the old owners of Blinkbonnie, especially as nothing more discreditable was connected with it than the folly of extravagance; but the present family have always been known as the Roses-for they took to that name, no doubt, from the wish of their granduncle, and according to law; since all these things were at tended to by Mr. Cairns, who then was a living epitome of all the statutes, and more methodical and precise than the town clock, which not seldom was what the old lawyer was never once known to be-out of time.

Some theories of that kind I wrought out in the moonlight night, and then turned to my own busi ness and thoughts.

CHAPTER XXIV.

EDINBURGH.

Ar that time, although Edinburgh has not sprung into greatness like her giant sister, Glasgow, which has grown of late years like the crinoline of young ladies, threatening in both cases to leave room for nothing else upon the earth; yet even the metropolis was on a more limited scale than now. It consisted more distinctly than at the present time of the Old Town and the New. Now it has the new, new town to the north, and Newington to the south,--with many additions to the west. The railways have introduced new features into a city which was then only considering whether steamers could be sent to sea, and doubting, in some odd quarters, whether they were not a contravention of Providential laws, and likely to bring destruction upon their owners.

The architecture and gardens of Edinburgh are probably more changed than any other features of the city. The latter wore a raw and young appearance like boyhood; and people rather thought of what they would be than what they were. architecture of the New Town was massive and plain,

The

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but defective in those decorative additions that | for it got more than ordinary cultivation. When have been made to it in recent times.

The suburbs and grounds around the city were rough, and although no other town in the county has the same profusion of public grounds, and none, perhaps, in Europe, has grounds equally grand and varied, yet they were rarely used, with the exception of the Meadows, and were not in a very agreeable condition for common use. The superiority to civil law enjoyed by a small district around the Abbey, and the King's-park gave value to the former as lodgings, and to the latter as a lounge for persons who deemed it imprudent to extend their morning or evening walk up the Canongate, but the Radical Road was then only a subject of talk.

In after years I have often wondered, when hearing people talk with some sort of enthusiasm in London of Highgate-hill, and Hampsteadheath, what they would pay for Salisbury Crags and Arthur's Seat, in Hyde-park or Regent'spark. It might be doubtful whether the construction of a pyramid would not pay the speculators in these quarters; while in Edinburgh, where the work has been done since the foundation of the world, little or nothing has been tried more by man for its improvement.

A street of plain houses, with interminable stairs, as I suppose, who never reached the top of them, looked full in the front of Arthur's Seat, and were convenient for the college and other class rooms. Our two windows were on the third floor, and for some little time my head was rather light as I looked from them, but that feeling all We had no garden, but the green park before us was something; and the high crags beyond it looked like far away among the hills.

wore away.

With a feeling that there was some design or device laid against my comfort in bringing me to that crowded haunt to wrestle mentally with Latin prosody and Greek verbs, I submitted to the yoke, more especially as Mr. Green, who was the only "kent" face I then met, and my only companion, was a very indulgent overseer. Gradually I found out more of his weak points than I had formerly known. One of them was connected with a small box of earth, which he had brought from Kirkhowe, and a tiny sprig of thyme that he had gathered from Kirkhowe graveyard; for he said that he liked to have something from the old place growing beside him. He did not tell me that the pretty stalk of thyme grew once upon a grave, but would have been as well pleased if I had believed that it came from Mrs. More's, or our own garden; yet, being a minister in a halfway, he could not conveniently and distinctly mis. represent the case. However, I did not need to inquire, for I could have told him the very spot from which it was cut, seeing I knew every root that grew there. I promised to attend the thyme carefully, and kept my word. Not being a difficult plant to manage, it spread out very beautifully,

puzzled with some abomination of an old poet's, I was wont to go and do someting with the box, and upon returning to our little table, I was helped over the Latin style.

Poor Mr. Green; it is very early yet; the sun has scarcely cast a beam upon the Firth; he is only awakening the laziest of the sea-gulls on the Bass; Inchkeith is lying in the morning mist, and the windows have not put on the screen of gold and silver spangles, wherewith they will give back his "good morning" by and by. It is very carly, and you need not put my box and my flower into the chill air until the day be fully dawned, and the sun shine out upon it. There, now, you need not even touch its little leavesand don't, if you please, water it so with tears, which drop and drop, as if the thyme were a living creature in a deep pit of sorrow. Poor Mr. Green, the secret is coming gradually up, or winding itself out, when you leave the bedroom-door open for the benefit of your sleeping protege, who does not sleep, but wakes and thinks, as boys will think. Well, he may have loved her more than me-he is better, and has a warmer heart!

I thought not, then, dear, kind friend, of all the good I gathered from your guidance. And, chief of all, the evils warded away by your presence; which seemed to be not often, but sometimes a restraint by the way, in that dangerous time when half our boys in years grow men in crime, under the miserable pretence of a legitimate curriculum; and the very heart of the intellect of the next generation, is rotted in its place by contact with corruption before it scarcely knows its meaning, to preserve the fees of a few old-some of them very old-gentlemen, and secure the worst of all monopolies the monopoly of literature.

Not always did I think; yet, now and then, it seemed to cross my mind as a gleam of light, that I also was like our box of thyme, guarded and guided for another's sake, and she was with the dead-taught and warned-and helped onward, because she would have been pleased to mark my progress; and then it seemed as if a hand from Kirkhowe was leading me still.

We thought not then of all the steps that would be taken, and all the sacrifices to be met, and the work to be braved, and the short time to be

given for it all, before that good heart, that turned even to the box of thyme, at morn and night, would cease to mind earthly flowers and be for ever more at rest, even that rest which remaineth.

The thyme is withered, withered, dead and gone. The eyes that looked on it so sadly weep no more. The flowers in the land that is afar off wither not, but bloom ever and never fade; and surely they must know them all well now, for it is so long, long ago since the first passed away, and long, even since the second went through the dark gate into the flowery laud where no heart grieves, and no eye weeps.

Our months passed away, one year after another

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