ical
skill they now showed." Turning from Delhi to Lucknow, many will
remember the account of the disastrous action at Chinhut by Mr. Rees. He
says: "The masses of the rebel cavalry by which the British were
outflanked near the Kookrail bridge, were apparently commanded by some
European who was seen waving his sword and attempting to make his men
follow him and dash at ours. He was a handsome-looking man, well-built,
fair, about twenty-five years of age, with light moustaches, wearing the
undress uniform of a European cavalry officer, with a blue, gold-laced
cap on his head." Mr. Rees suggests the possibility of this person
having been either a Russian or a renegade Christian.

The only other case to which I will allude came under my own
observation. I have told in my fourteenth chapter how Brigadier Adrian
Hope was killed in the abortive attack on the fort of Rooyah, by a shot
fired from a high tree inside the fort, and how it was commonly believed
that the man who fired the shot was a European. I myself thought at the
time that such was the case, and now I am convinced of it. I was the
non-commissioned officer of a party of the Ninety-Third sent to cover an
engineer-officer who had either volunteered or been ordered to take a
sketch of one of the fort gates and its approaches, in the hope of being
able to blow it in, and thus gain an entrance to the fort, which was
surrounded by a deep ditch, and inside the ditch an almost impenetrable
belt of prickly bamboos about ten yards in breadth, so interwoven and
full of thorns that a cat could scarcely have passed through it. Under
the guidance of a native of the Intelligence Department, we managed to
advance unseen, and got under cover of a thick clump of bamboos near the
gate. Strict orders had been given that no one on any account whatever
was to speak, much less to fire a shot, unless we should be attacked,
for fear of drawing attention to our proceedings, till the engineer had
had time to make a rough sketch of the position of the gate and its
approaches. During this time we were so close to the fort that we could
hear the enemy talking inside; and the man who was on the tree could be
seen and heard by us quite plainly, calling to the stormers on the other
face in unmistakable barrack-room English: "Come on, you ----
Highlanders! Come on, Scotty! you have a harder nut to crack than eating
oatmeal porridge. If you can come through these bamboos we'll warm your
---- for yo