There's a gaunt crowd on the highway-are ye But our whitening bones against ye will rise as

come to pray to man,

witnesses,

With hollow eyes that cannot weep, and for words From the cabins and the ditches, in their charred, your faces wan? uncoffin'd masses,

For the Angel of the Trumpet will know them as he passes.

A ghastly, spectral army, before the great God we'll stand,

And arraign ye as our murderers, the spoilers of our land.

No; the blood is dead within our veins-we care not now for life;

Let us die hid in the ditches, far from children and from wife;

We cannot stay and listen to their raving, famished cries

Bread! Bread! Bread! and none to still their agonies.

We left our infants playing with their dead

mother's hand:

THE EXODUS.

We left our maidens maddened by the fever's "A million a decade!" Calmly and cold

The units are read by our statesmen sage;
Little they think of a nation old,
Fading away from history's page;

scorching brand:

Better, maiden, thou wert strangled in thy own dark-twisted tresses

Better, infant, thou wert smothered in thy mother's first caresses.

We are fainting in our misery, but God will hear
our groan;

"A million a decade!"-of human wrecks,
Corpses lying in fever sheds-

Yet, if fellow-men desert us, will He hearken Corpses huddled on foundering decks,
from his throne?
And shroudless dead on their rocky beds;
Accursed are we in our own land, yet toil we still Nerve and muscle, and heart and brain,
and toil;
Lost to Ireland-lost in vain.

But the stranger reaps our harvest-the alien owns our soil.

O Christ! how have we sinned, that on our native plains

We perish houseless, naked, starved, with branded brow, like Cain's?

Dying, dying wearily, with a torture sure and
slow-

Dying, as a dog would die, by the wayside as we go.
One by one they're falling round us, their pale

faces to the sky;

We've no strength left to dig them graves-there let them lie.

The wild bird, if he's stricken, is mourned by the others,

But we-we die in Christian land--we die amid our brothers,

In the land which God has given, like a wild beast
in his cave,

Without a tear, a prayer, a shroud, a coffin, or a
grave.
Ha! but think ye the contortions on each livid
face ye see,
Will not be read on judgment-day by eyes of Deity?

Outcast weeds by a desolate sea-
Fallen leaves of humanity.

We are wretches, famished, scorned, human tools
to build your pride,
But God will yet take vengeance for the souls for
whom Christ died.

"A million a decade!" Count ten by ten,
Column and line of the record fair;
Each unit stands for ten thousand men,
Staring with blank, dead eye-balls there;

Strewn like blasted trees on the sod,
Men that were made in the image of God.

"A million a decade!"-and nothing done;
And the war for the right not yet begun,
The Cæsars had less to conquer a world;

The banner of freedom not yet unfurled:
The soil is fed by the weed that dies;
If forest leaves fall, yet they fertilize.

But ye-dead, dead, not climbing the height,

Not clearing a path for the future to tread;
Not opening the golden portals of light,
Ere the gate was choked by your piled-up dead:
Martyrs ye, yet never a name
Shines on the golden roll of fame.

Had ye rent one gyve of the festering chain,
Strangling the life of the nation's soul;
Poured your life-blood by river and plain,
Yet touched with your dead hand freedom's goal;
Left of heroes one footprint more

On our soil, tho' stamped in your gore

Now is your hour of pleasure-bask ye in the We could triumph while mourning the brave,
Dead for all that was holy and just,

world's caress;

MEADOWS TAYLOR.

BORN 1808 DIED 1876.

[Colonel Meadows Taylor was born in Slater | poo Sultaun, a Tale, the first, was published in Street, Liverpool, Sept. 25, 1808. Both his 1840, Tara followed in 1863, Ralph Darnell in father and grandfather were Irish, and he 1865, and Seeta in 1872. The last mentioned, himself spent the last years of his life in the from which our quotation is taken, deals with family house in Ireland, Old Court, Harold's the period of the Indian mutiny; and, like Cross, Dublin. He was sent out to India all the books of the author, gives a lifelike when quite a boy, to what promised to be a and picturesque description of the strange lucrative situation in a mercantile house in people, curious customs and ideas, and wild Bombay. The merchant, however, proved to scenes in India, that land of wonders. Colonel be an embarrassed tradesman; and the dis- Taylor also wrote a Manual of Indian History, appointed lad had to look for other employ- A Noble Queen, and the Story of my Life, pubment. In this difficulty a kinsman came to lished by his daughter after his death, in which his aid, and obtained him a commission as one his strange and adventurous career is told in of the military contingent of the Nizam of a simple and unpretentious style. Most of Hyderabad. his works are now being republished in a cheap form by Messrs. C. Kegan Paul & Co.

He paid a visit to India in 1875, and on his way home died at Mentone, May 13, 1876.]

The connection which thus opened between the young officer and the native ruler lasted, in one form or another, for the thirty-eight years which Taylor spent in India. His career was most useful and distinguished. Appointed after he had passed through some minor positions to be the administrator of the province of Shorapoor, he succeeded by his courage and tact in reducing thousands of hitherto unsubdued warriors to tranquillity; increased the revenue, while reducing the taxation; and, in short, changed a most turbulent and ill-governed, into an orderly and comparatively prosperous state. He also distinguished himself several times during his career by the astuteness with which he tracked out the crimes which were perpetrated by the murderous Thugs; and he was one of the first Europeans to suspect the existence of that fell organization. During the mutiny he rendered great services to the English forces by keeping the portions of the North-west quiet, and by supplying stores to the British forces. In 1860 he left India amid the deep regrets of the native population, to whom he had endeared himself by his sense of justice, his evenness of temper, combined with strength of will, and his evident anxiety for their interest and respect for their feelings.

On his first visit to England on vacation he offered to a publisher a work he had written in India, Confessions of a Thug. The encouraging reception which this met turned his thoughts to literature; and, as a result, he produced at intervals a series of stories illustrative of great epochs in Indian history. Tip

HOW THE MUTINY WAS PREPARED. (FROM "SEETA."1)

[Azráel Pandé, the chief personage in the following scene, is a leader of the Dacoits, or murderous robbers of India, who formed one of the revolutionary elements that led to the Indian mutiny. The passage quoted describes one of the secret meetings, in which this emissary prepared the way for the outbreak.]

After the close of the Afghan war much discontent was manifested in the Bengal native army. The massacre of the Khyber Pass was bitterly remembered, and the English government was held, by the men of Oudh and Bahar, to be responsible for the loss and desolation which had fallen upon the thousands of families of those who had perished in the miserable retreat from Kabool. If this did not affect the majority of the men in actual service, so as to form a ground for complaint or mutiny, there was another subject which every day became, in their minds, one of paramount importance; one which grew with the times, and the increasing dominion of the British power. The Bengal Sepoys had hitherto been employed, with a few trifling exceptions, in India only, and chiefly in those provinces wherein their

1 By permission of Messrs. C. Kegan Paul & Co.

homes lay. True, they had marched as cheer- | to the jungles of Bundelkhund. He had befully into Afghanistan as the Rajpoots had come a leader in the local insurrection that in the times of the Moghul emperor Akhbar, followed; had narrowly escaped capture; and and that tradition was not dead; but it had though ever welcomed by Sepoys, and supbeen as a temporary and exceptional service, ported by his rare talent of recitation, became, it was well paid while it lasted, and, it was under a vow to Kalee, the Dacoit leader of believed, would not recur again. Sinde, how-whom this tale has had experience. This man ever, had become British in 1843, and, it was | had traversed the Punjab, where, in 1849 and 1850, a spirit of mutiny prevailed, which was suppressed with difficulty, and was similar to that of 1844. He had passed then from station to station, from regiment to regiment, carrying messages and letters, urging, instigating, and exhorting all. He went too to Dehly, and Amballa, and Meerut, finding everywhere existence of the same spirit; but, while many were like-minded, the majority hesitated and hung back. There was no general combination, and no settled purpose anywhere.

at first determined, should be garrisoned by native troops from Bengal. So, therefore, regiments were told off for the duty from among those which lay on the frontier of the Punjab; and one, the Sixty-fourth, when on its march southwards, mutinied for war-pay. It seemed to the men that it was no part of their contract to serve in, to them, a foreign land, without the substantial reward of increased pay; and under the sympathy of the whole of their comrades throughout the army, the Sixty-fourth refused to proceed. Eventually, and relying on an unwarrantable promise made to them by their colonel, they did march, and arrived in Sinde, where the truth was made known to them. Then they mutinied again; but subsequently became penitent at Lukhnow, and only the leading men of the mutiny were punished.

The question among all was merely mercenary; whether, in fact, they should serve in the Punjab on ordinary pay, or demand and exact the war allowances. If he urged a combined movement of mutiny, the elders wagged their heads, told him that the salt of the Koompanee Bahadoor was still sweet, and till it became bitter in their mouths they would bide their time. Most of the petty intrigues of the Dehly Court were known to him; but they excited no interest or sympathy among his comrades, and so the Punjab excitement gradually appeared to die out. Regiments in their turn came and went in ordinary course; and, after the example of the disbandment of the Sixty-sixth the idea of further mutiny seemed to have passed away.

When Azráel Pandé escaped from Noorpoor he betook himself to his old courses; for he was practically safer among Sepoys than in the country at large. Again he made his way to Meerut, Dehly, and other large stations, and heard from his friends, with exultation, that the discontent, which had seemed to slumber for a while, existed in deeper force than ever; and he soon learned also, that the smouldering fire needed but a breath to be blown into a fierce conflagration which should cover the land.

Similar in spirit and design was the mutiny, in the same year, of the Thirty-fourth Regiment, then stationed on the Punjab frontier. Disaffected to the core, it presented no feature or chance of redemption to loyalty: and it was marched to Meerut, where native officers and men, guilty and innocent alike, were at a public parade stripped of their uniforms and cast adrift, with every accompaniment of disgrace, to become the leaven of much further mischief than that which had prevailed. The wisdom of the act was questioned by many then, as it came to be in subsequent years; but the authorities had decided that an overwhelming necessity existed for the enforcement of discipline in the native army, and for a time the fate of the Thirty-fourth seemed to have effected the desired end. What became of the regiment no one knew, or perhaps cared to know very much; the men were neither watched nor traced, and seemed to have disappeared among the vast population to which they belonged.

Of one, however, we know--a restless, vindictive spirit, who for twelve years had roamed through the country, disseminating the leaven of his own regiment, wherever he went, with a skill and pertinacity which were worthy of a better cause. Immediately after the scene

Was he singular in this? Indeed, no. Wherever he went he found others as active and earnest as himself; working, if not exactly to the same end, at least in the same direction. He found that the ordinary Brahmin priesthood were rapidly becoming aroused to the dangers that threatened their faith, and had become active missionaries of sedition. He

at Meerut Azráel Pandé had betaken himself | heard of Mahomedans who, with bolder views,