The North-West had by this time fallen from the feeble hands of Colvin into the grasp of the rebels. In Gwalior the British Resident, by his personal ascendency, held Scindia to his loyalty, though Scindia’s army revolted. But for George Lawrence, Rajpootana would have been lost. As for Oudh, there the struggle was becoming tragic. On the eve of the insurrection this province, seething with sedition, was put under the rule of Sir Henry Lawrence. Lucknow, with 700,000 inhabitants, was a hotbed of treason, and the success of the mutineers at Meerut agitated them profoundly. At the end of May the Sepoys in Lucknow rose and marched away to Delhi, leaving Lawrence with a handful of Europeans to hold a rebellious city. Cawnpore is forty miles south of Lucknow, and there General Wheeler and another devoted band were similarly situated. On the night of the 21st of May, Wheeler and the English population--about a thousand souls--withdrew into a kind of temporary fortress which he had created, and which he defended by some 210 men. At Cawnpore, in May, 1857, there was residing a young Mahratta noble, Nana Sahib by name, whose popular manners had rendered him a favourite in the English community. He had been the adopted heir of the last Peishwa of Berari, and his grievance against the Government was that Dalhousie refused to let him enjoy the pension guaranteed to the Peishwa and his successors. Nana Sahib had spent a season in London to press his claims, and had been most hospitably received. His agent, Azin Oolla Khan, had returned to India after visiting the Crimea, and bearing to his master tales which were partially true, of the defeats and humiliations which England had suffered during her war with Russia. Nana Sahib had been busy with plots against the English _raj_ for many years, and his agents were ubiquitous. In Oudh they had been especially active, for they had taken every advantage of the mistakes of an over-zealous Commissioner--Mr. Coverley Jackson--to fan the flame of discontent in that province. Yet Wheeler trusted the Nana Sahib so implicitly that he put the treasury of Cawnpore in the charge of his personal retinue lest his own Native troops might fail him. On the 4th of June General Wheeler’s Sepoys revolted, joined Nana Sahib’s retinue in plundering the treasury, and then, laden with spoil, set out for Delhi. But the Nana’s idea was to win empire for himself rather than for a degenerate descendant of the Mogul dynasty. He therefore persuaded the rebels to return, and besiege the English garrison at Cawnpore. On the twentieth day of the siege he sent one of his prisoners, an old lady named Greenway, to General Wheeler, offering the beleaguered English a safe conduct to Allahabad if they would surrender. The offer was accepted. On the 27th of June the survivors--men, women, and children, about 450 in all--marched to the boats which had been prepared for them. As soon as