Then followed an act of inconceivable folly. The eighty-five sepoys who had been kept for three days under a strong guard of European soldiers, were made over to the civil authorities, and lodged in the civil jail, only two miles from the sepoy cantonments, under the charge of Asiatic warders. The consequence was that the sepoys brooded over the fate of their comrades, and secretly determined on rescuing them from the jail, and murdering their European officers. [Sidenote: Sunday morning.] Strange to say, not an idea of danger seems to have crossed the minds of the British authorities at Meerut. The Europeans went to church on Sunday morning, lounged through the heat and languor of the day, and prepared for church in the evening. Meanwhile there had been agitation and excitement in the sepoy lines, but nothing to excite alarm. The native women of the bazaar taunted the sepoys of the cavalry with not having rescued their comrades, and that was all. [Sidenote: Mutiny and massacre.] Suddenly, about five o'clock on that Sunday afternoon, the sepoys seized their arms and ammunition, and rushed out of their lines, with loud shouts and discharges of musketry. A detachment of sepoy cavalry galloped off to the jail, and liberated not only their eighty-five comrades, but all the other prisoners, 1,500 in number. The whole body then returned to the cantonment and joined the sepoys, who were burning down bungalows, and murdering every European they met, regardless of sex and age. Ladies riding in carriages, and officers driving in their buggies, who had left their homes without a suspicion of evil, were assaulted and fired at as they drove along. In a word, within a brief space of time the sepoy cantonments, and the roads round about, were a scene of riot, bloodshed, and outrage, which are beyond description. At last, fearing that the European soldiers would soon fall upon them, the whole mass of sepoys, the cavalry in front and the infantry straggling behind, rushed off to Delhi. The movement was only natural. Delhi was the only walled city in the North-West Provinces in which they could find a refuge. No European troops were quartered within the city or the suburbs; and a vast magazine of arms and ammunition was seated in the heart of the city, mostly in charge of Asiatics, who would doubtless open the gates at the first demand for surrender. [Sidenote: Inaction.]