Nothing contributed so much to check the spread of the rebellion of 1857 as the individual courage and pugnacity of our countrymen resident in the East. Civil and military alike, they were all skilled in the use of weapons, and cool in the presence of personal danger. Such a habit of body and mind they acquired both for policy and for pleasure. Every Anglo-Indian is well aware that he is one of an imperial race, holding its own in the midst of a subject population by dint of foresight and martial prowess. There were villages of evil reputation which on the day of assessment the collector preferred to visit on the back of the steadiest Arab in his stables, with a favourite hog spear carelessly balanced beside his right stirrup. There were notorious bits of road where the traveller felt more comfortable if he heard from time to time the lock of his revolver clanking against the soda-water bottles in the pocket of his palanquin. Never was there a better training-school for warfare than the Indian hunting-field. A man who has heard unmoved above his head the scream of a crippled elephant;--who behind his trusty Westley Richards has awaited, calm and collected, the last rush of a wounded tiger;--need not doubt what his behaviour may be in any possible emergency. He who, like more than one true sportsman, has hardly crawled away, bloody knife in hand, from the embrace of a dying bear:--who has kept at bay a forty-inch boar with the butt of his shivered lance;--will not be at a loss how to meet the charge of a mutinous trooper. The rebels found to their cost that the Sahibs, like old stalkers of large game, were seldom foolhardy and never remiss:--that they were neither fluttered by peril nor over-excited by success:--that they rarely failed to make the most of what cover they could get, and still more rarely wasted a cartridge. Lieutenant Thomson contrived a sort of perch half-way up the wall of his barrack, in which he stationed a young officer, named Stirling, of high repute as a marksman, who soon proved that a rebel running home to his dinner was at least as easy to hit as an ibex bounding down the crags in a Himalayan valley, or a blue cow dodging in and out amidst the trunks of an Oude forest.