Some of the Bengal cavalry at Meerut had been imprisoned for refusing to use their cartridges; their comrades rose in rebellion, fired on their officers, released the prisoners, and murdered some Europeans. The British troops rallied and repulsed the mutineers, who fled to Delhi, unhappily reached it in safety, and required and obtained the protection of the feeble old King, the last of the Moguls, there residing. Him they proclaimed their Emperor, and avowed the intention of restoring his dynasty to its ancient supremacy. The native troops in the city and its environs at once prepared to join them; and thus from a mere mutiny, such as had occurred once and again before, the rising assumed the character of a vast revolutionary war. For a moment it seemed that our hard-won supremacy in the East was disappearing in a sea of blood. The foe were numerous, fanatical, and ruthless; we ourselves had trained and disciplined them for war; the sympathies of their countrymen were very largely with them. Yet, with incredible effort and heroism more than mortal, the small and scattered forces of England again snatched the mastery from the hands of the overwhelming numbers arrayed against them. [Illustration: Sir Colin Campbell.] One name has obtained an immortality of infamy in connection with this struggle--that of the Nana Sahib, who by his hideous treachery at Cawnpore took revenge on confiding Englishmen and women for certain wrongs inflicted on him in regard to the inheritance of his adopted father by the last Governor-General. But many other names have been crowned with deathless honour, the just reward of unsurpassed achievement, of supreme fidelity and valour, at a crisis under which feeble natures would have fainted and fallen. Of these are Lord Canning himself, the noble brothers John and Henry Lawrence, the Generals Havelock, Outram, and Campbell, and others whom space forbids us even to name. The Governor-General remained calm, resolute, and intrepid amidst the panic and the rage which shook Calcutta when the first appalling news of the Mutiny broke upon it. He disdained the cruel counsels of fear, and steadily refused to confound the innocent with the guilty among the natives; but he knew where to strike, and when, and how. On his own responsibility he stayed the British troops on their way to the scene of war in China, and made them serve the graver, more immediate need of India, doing it with the concurrence of Lord Elgin, the envoy responsible for the Chinese business; and he poured his forces on Delhi, the heart of the insurrection, resolving to make an end of it there before ever reinforcement direct from England could come. After a difficult and terrible siege, the place was carried by storm on September 20th, 1857--an achievement that cost many noble lives, and chief among them that of the gallant Nicholson, a soldier whose mind and character seem to have made on all who knew him an impression as of supernatural grandeur.