And if it should ever come to fade from his memory he has only to look at a little bronze Maltese cross which hangs among his other medals on his breast, to remind himself of a time when it was touch-and-go with death. CHAPTER X. INDIA.--THE BLOWING UP OF THE CASHMERE GATE. The final assault of Delhi, the leap of a little army of five thousand British and native soldiers upon a strongly fortified city held by fifty thousand rebels, forms one of the most exciting chapters in the history of the Indian Mutiny, and the blowing up of the Cashmere Gate one of its most heroic incidents. Once more did the gallant “sappers and miners,” whom we last saw doing noble work in the trenches at Sebastopol, here show themselves ready to face any peril at duty’s call. The decision to make the attack was come to at that historic council on September 6th, 1857, to which Nicholson went fully prepared to propose that General Wilson should be superseded did he hesitate longer. On the following day the engineers under Baird-Smith and his able lieutenants set to work to construct the trenching batteries, and by the 13th enough had been done to warrant the assault. We have a very vivid picture drawn for us by several writers of how, on the night of the 13th, four Engineer subalterns stole out of the camp on the Ridge and crept cautiously up to the walls of the enemy’s bastions to see what condition they were in. Greathed, Home, Medley, and Lang were the names of the four; one of them, Lieutenant Home, was to earn undying fame the next day at the Cashmere Gate. Armed with swords and revolvers, the party--divided into two sections--slipped into the great ditch, sixteen feet deep, and made for the top of the breach. But quiet as they were, the sepoy sentries on the wall above had heard them. Men were heard running from point to point. “They conversed in a low tone,” writes Medley, who was with Lang under the Cashmere Bastion, “and presently we heard the ring of their steel ramrods as they loaded.” Huddled into the darkest corner of the ditch, the two officers waited anxiously for the sepoys to go away, when another attempt might be made; but the alarmed sentries held their ground. The engineers, however, had seen that the breach was a good one, “the slope being easy of ascent and no guns on the flank,” so the four of them jumped up and made a bolt for home. Directly they were discovered a volley rattled out from behind them, and the whizzing of balls about their ears quickened their steps over the rough ground. Luckily not one was hit.