In the beginning of 1857 the clouds that presaged the awful storm of mutiny which Sir Charles Napier had foretold and temporarily averted seven years earlier, were ominously gathering over the Bengal Presidency. On the 19th of February the first flash of actual outbreak burst forth at Berhampore. The revolt spread to Barrackpore, and in the course of a few weeks it became apparent that the spirit of insubordination was gradually but surely ripening throughout the Bengal army. In the middle of May the crisis which had been threatening for three months came to a head at Meerut. The revolt of the native troops at that great station was consummated in rapine and slaughter. Delhi, with its vast munitions of war unprotected save by a handful of devoted European soldiers, fell into the hands of the insurgents. The pensioned King of Delhi was drawn from his senile obscurity and proclaimed Emperor of India, and the great city became the capital of a rival power and the centre of attraction to the revolted army. The native regiments in the stations of the North-West Provinces broke out successively into revolt and hastened tumultuously to Delhi, which soon contained within its walls a turbulent mass of many thousand mutinous soldiers. Within a month after the outbreak at Meerut British authority had become almost extinct throughout the North-West Provinces. From Meerut to Allahabad, among a population of some thirty millions and throughout an area of many hundred miles, there remained no vestige of British occupation, save where at Agra the British residents were waiting anxiously for the signal to withdraw from their bungalows into the shelter of Akbar's fort, and the hapless people closely beleaguered in Wheeler's miserable entrenchment at Cawnpore. Across the Ganges throughout Oude, British men, women, and children were being mercilessly slaughtered by revolted sepoys; and Henry Lawrence, himself in the midst of troops scarcely caring to cloak their mutinous intentions, had soon sadly to realise that all Oude was gone except the Lucknow Residency, where he was to die after having exhausted himself in successful exertions to make that position defensible by the brave and steadfast men who survived him.