[31] See Moule's _Charles Simeon_, p. 201. CHAPTER VII CAWNPORE, 1809-1810 Mrs. Sherwood, known in the first decade of this century as a writer of such Anglo-Indian tales as _Little Henry and his Bearer_, and as a philanthropist who did much for the white and the dark orphans of British soldiers in India, was one of the many who came under the influence of Henry Martyn. This Lichfield girl, whose father had been the playmate of Samuel Johnson, and who had known Garrick and Dr. Darwin, Hannah More and Maria Edgeworth, had married her cousin, the paymaster of the King's 53rd Regiment of Foot. The regiment was sent to Bengal. On its way up the Hoogli from Calcutta in boats, Mr. Sherwood and his wife were walking after sunset, when they stumbled on 'a small society' of their own men, who met regularly to read their Bibles and to pray, often in old stores, ravines, woods, and other retired places. 'The very existence of any person in the barracks who had the smallest notion of the importance of religion was quite unsuspected by me,' writes Mrs. Sherwood in her Autobiography.[32] 'I am not severe when I assert that at that time there really was not one in the higher ranks in the regiment who had courage enough to come forward and say, "I think it right, in this distant land, to do, as it regards religion, what I have been accustomed to do at home."' At Berhampore, the chaplain, Mr. Parson, began that good work in the 53rd which Martyn and Corrie afterwards carried on. When it continued the voyage up the Ganges, after a season, by Dinapore to Cawnpore, Mr. Parson gave the Sherwoods a letter of introduction to Martyn, then about to leave Dinapore. To this fact we owe the fullest and the brightest glimpses that we get of Henry Martyn, from the outside, all through his career. We are enabled to supplement the abasing self-revelation of his nature before God, as recorded in his _Journal_, by the picture of his daily life, drawn by a woman of keen sympathy and some shrewdness. The moment the boat anchored at Dinapore Mr. Sherwood set out on foot to present his letter. He found the chaplain in the smaller square, at some distance, in a 'sort of church-like abode with little furniture, the rooms wide and high, with many vast doorways, having their green jalousied doors, and long verandahs encompassing two sides of the quarters.'