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?

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:

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.

THE EXODUS.

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

scorching brand:

Better, maiden, thou wert strangled in thy own

dark-twisted tresses

Better, infant, thou wert smothered in thy mo

ther's first caresses.

The units are read by our statesmen sage;
Little they think of a nation old,

Fading away from history's page;
Outcast weeds by a desolate sea-
Fallen leaves of humanity.

We are fainting in our misery, but God will hear "A million a decade!"-of human wrecks,

our groan;

Corpses lying in fever sheds

Yet, if fellow-men desert us, will He hearken Corpses huddled on foundering decks,

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,

And shroudless dead on their rocky beds;
Nerve and muscle, and heart and brain,
Lost to Ireland-lost in vain.

"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;

In the land which God has given, like a wild beast Not opening the golden portals of light,

Now is your hour of pleasure-bask ye in the We could triumph while mourning the brave,

world's caress;

Dead for all that was holy and just,

[Colonel Meadows Taylor was born in Slater | poo Sultaun, a Tale, the first, was published in Street, Liverpool, Sept. 25, 1808. Both his father and grandfather were Irish, and he himself spent the last years of his life in the family house in Ireland, Old Court, Harold's Cross, Dublin. He was sent out to India when quite a boy, to what promised to be a lucrative situation in a mercantile house in Bombay. The merchant, however, proved to be an embarrassed tradesman; and the disappointed lad had to look for other employment. In this difficulty a kinsman came to his aid, and obtained him a commission as one of the military contingent of the Nizam of Hyderabad.

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

1840, Tara followed in 1863, Ralph Darnell in 1865, and Seeta in 1872. The last mentioned, from which our quotation is taken, deals with the period of the Indian mutiny; and, like all the books of the author, gives a lifelike and picturesque description of the strange people, curious customs and ideas, and wild scenes in India, that land of wonders. Colonel Taylor also wrote a Manual of Indian History, A Noble Queen, and the Story of my Life, published by his daughter after his death, in which his strange and adventurous career is told in a simple and unpretentious style. Most of 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.]

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 at first determined, should be garrisoned by 1850, a spirit of mutiny prevailed, which was native troops from Bengal. So, therefore, suppressed with difficulty, and was similar to regiments were told off for the duty from that of 1844. He had passed then from station among those which lay on the frontier of the to station, from regiment to regiment, carrying Punjab; and one, the Sixty-fourth, when on messages and letters, urging, instigating, and its march southwards, mutinied for war-pay. exhorting all. He went too to Dehly, and It seemed to the men that it was no part of Amballa, and Meerut, finding everywhere their contract to serve in, to them, a foreign existence of the same spirit; but, while many land, without the substantial reward of in- were like-minded, the majority hesitated and creased pay; and under the sympathy of the hung back. There was no general combinawhole of their comrades throughout the army, tion, and no settled purpose anywhere. 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.

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 When Azráel Pandé escaped from Noorpoor mischief than that which had prevailed. The he betook himself to his old courses; for he wisdom of the act was questioned by many was practically safer among Sepoys than in then, as it came to be in subsequent years; the country at large. Again he made his way but the authorities had decided that an over- to Meerut, Dehly, and other large stations, whelming necessity existed for the enforce- and heard from his friends, with exultation, ment of discipline in the native army, and for that the discontent, which had seemed to a time the fate of the Thirty-fourth seemed slumber for a while, existed in deeper force to have effected the desired end. What be- than ever; and he soon learned also, that the came of the regiment no one knew, or perhaps smouldering fire needed but a breath to be cared to know very much; the men were nei-blown into a fierce conflagration which should ther watched nor traced, and seemed to have cover the land. 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 at Meerut Azráel Pandé had betaken himself

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 heard of Mahomedans who, with bolder views,