. "DO YOU SEE THIS DAGGER?"

Morning in Delhi! The fiery sun leaped up, gilding once more the far
Himalayas and lighting the bloodstained plains of Oude. The golden
shafts twinkled on the huge colonnade, the vast ruined arch, the
crumbling walls, and the huge castled oval of Humayoon's tomb. In the
dark night, the monsoon winds wailed over the wreck of Hindu, Pathan,
and Mogul magnificence. The dark demons of Bowanee rejoiced at a new
sacrifice to the gloomy goddess; and the straggling jungle was alive
again.

In the vacant caverns, whence the sons of Mohammed Bahadur were
once dragged forth to die by daring Hodson's smoking pistols, their
slaughtered shades grinned over the ghastly vengeance of the barren
years.

The huge dome of the mosque hung in air over the vacant palaces of the
great Moguls, and the far windmill ridge, and the bastioned walls of
Delhi were bathed in golden light, while Alan Hawke slept the sleep
of exhaustion. And while Ram Lal Singh, secure in his zenana, calmly
greeted the cool morning hour with a smiling face and a happy heart, in
the lonely marble house, stern old Hugh Fraser Johnstone slept the sleep
that knows no waking.

The Chandnee Chouk awoke to its busy daily chatter, and old
Shahjehanabad sought its pleasures languidly again, or bowed its
shoulders once more under the yoke of toil.

The faithful sought the Jumna Musjid for morning prayer, and the
nonchalant British officials began to straggle into the vacant Hall of
the Peacock Throne.

Far away, the Kootab Minar, rising three hundred feet in air, bore
its mute witness to the splendor of the vanished rulers of Delhi, the
peerless Ghori swordsmen of Khorassan. But, even as the soldiers of the
old Pathan fort had marched out into the shadowless night of death to
join Ghori and Baber and Nadir Shah, so the spirit of the lonely old
miser nabob had sought the echoless shore.

When Simpson had unavailingly endeavored to awaken his master, the
locked doors were burst in at last by the anxious servants, and they
found only the tenantless shell of the mighty millionaire, as cold and
rigid as the iron pillar which veils to-day its mystery of a forgotten
past, when the jackals howl in the ruins of old Delhi.

Then rose up a wild outcry, and the sound of hurrying feet. The alert
old veteran servitor, with instinctive military obedience, dispatched
two messengers, on the run, to notify General Willoughby and Major Alan
Hawke. And the