her admiral nor the youngest middy would disgrace himself
by such ridiculous finery from the rag-fair of cosmopolitan swindling.
The real origin of so savage an absurdity is this:--Amongst the
commercial bodies of the three presidencies in all the leading cities,
it became a matter of difficulty often to describe special individuals
in any way legally operative. Your wish was to distinguish him from
the native merchant or banker; but to do this by calling him a British
merchant, &c., was possibly not true, and legally, therefore, not
safe. He might be a Dane, a Russian, or a Frenchman; he was described,
therefore, in a more generalising way, as a European. But a case so
narrow as _that_--a case for pawnbrokers and old clothesmen--ought not
to regulate the usage of great nations. Grand and spirit-stirring
(especially in a land far _distant_ from home) are the recollections
of towns or provinces connected with men's nativities. And poisonous
to all such ancestral inspirations are the rascally devices of shroffs
and money-changers.

DELHI.

That man--I suppose we are all agreed--who commanded in Meerut on
Sunday the tenth day of May, in the year of Christ one thousand eight
hundred and fifty-seven, a day which will furnish an epoch for ever to
the records of civilisation--that man who _could_ have stopped the
bloody kennel of hounds, but did _not_, racing in full cry to the
homes of our unsuspecting brothers and sisters in Delhi--it were good
for that man if he had not been born. He had notice such as might have
wakened the dead early in the afternoon (2 or 3 o'clock P.M., I
believe), and yet, at the end of a long summer day, torchlight found
him barely putting his foot into the stirrup. And why into the stirrup
at all? For what end, on what pretence, should he ever have played out
the ridiculous pantomime and mockery of causing the cavalry to mount?
Two missions there were to execute on that fatal night--first, to save
our noble brothers and sisters at Delhi from a ruin that was destined
to be total; secondly, to inflict instant and critical retribution
upon those who had already opened the carnival of outrage, before they
left Meerut. Oh, heaven and earth! heart so timid was there in all
this world, sense of wrong so callous, as not to leap with frenzy of
joy at so sublime a summons to wield the most impassioned functions of
Providence--namely, hell-born destroyers to destroy in the very
instant of their fancied triu