Four days after the Queen had inspected the regiment it moved to Dublin, where the arrival of the reserve companies from Malta and the depôt from Preston brought up the numbers at headquarters to seventeen hundred and sixty-nine of all ranks. On the 25th of August, new Colours were presented by the Earl of Carlisle, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the old Colours finding a fitting resting-place in St Patrick’s Cathedral, where they hang over the monuments to the Royal Irishmen who laid down their lives for their country in the swamps of China, in the jungles of Burma, and on the blood-stained glacis of the fortress of Sebastopol. A few months later the regiment was warned for foreign service, this time at the Cape of Good Hope, but the order was cancelled when the news reached England that the native army of Bengal had mutinied, and the XVIIIth remained in Ireland, very indignant at not being sent at once to help quell the rising in India. It was not until the autumn of 1857 that the War Office determined to employ the Royal Irish in the East: an advance party of three companies (in all, 208 officers and men) embarked on September 24, followed in two months by headquarters and the remainder of the XVIIIth (666 of all ranks), who reached Bombay early in February, 1858.[181] They landed, hoping to be in time to take an active part in the campaign, and their disappointment was bitter when they were ordered to Poona, a great city in the Bombay Presidency. The Royal Irish found much heavy work awaiting them, for the place was then, as it still is, a hot-bed of sedition, ready to revolt at any moment; and the troops were constantly under arms to prevent an outbreak. But as the accounts of successive British victories in northern and central India reached the malcontents, the danger diminished, and in April, 1858, the local situation had sufficiently improved to warrant the withdrawal of part of the British garrison from Poona. On the Royal Irish was thrown the duty of providing detachments in various places in western India, to watch native regiments of doubtful loyalty, and help the civil power in re-establishing law and order round their posts. With the dispersal of the regiment disappeared its chances of service as a complete unit, but each company commander still hoped to have to deal individually with a body of rebels, or with one of the bands of marauders called into existence by the mutiny. Fate, however, was not kind to the Royal Irish in 1858-59: the strenuous work of the detachments was unrelieved by a single fight, and even when three or four companies were brought together for some combined movement they had no luck; in extreme heat they made forced marches, cut roads through jungle, forded rivers, but all to no purpose: wherever they went the enemy disappeared, to fall into the hands of some column operating many miles away.