The glorious winter of 1856-7 was just opening when, accompanied by a retinue of servants and a string of camels and carts which contained everything necessary for a long camping-out tour, he left Bombay. He had been a great success amongst the little society of that picturesque Eastern capital, and he took with him a host of introductions to English people of the civil and military orders on his route, any of whom would have received him with pleasure; but he seldom took advantage of his privileges, mixing by choice with the people of the country. Hoosanee--the bearer of the late rajah and his own principal servant--was the medium of communication. When the work of the day was over--the long march, or the patient quest into the secrets of antiquity--Brahmin priests and Brahmin beggars, old soldiers, dispossessed landowners, and native merchants both Hindu and Mohammedan, would be introduced by him into the tent where sat the English-bred youth in his Oriental dress, ready and anxious to discuss the questions that separate East and West. On these occasions Tom would sometimes surprise himself. He would sit down ignorant. He would listen to what his visitors had to say and keep silence. Then suddenly, and to himself most mysteriously, a flash of inspiration would come, so that he would speak to them--not as a young man and a foreigner--but as one who knew the land, and had authority amongst its peoples. It was a critical moment in the history of English dominion in India. Lord Dalhousie's policy of annexation had added to the empire vast provinces, the new rulers of which, impatient to see the fruit of their labours, made, in many cases with a stroke of the pen, such changes as, in the natural order of things, it would have taken years upon years to effect. But society remained what it had been. There was no relaxation of the tyranny of caste--no attempt to educate those in whose hands lie the influences that mould the lives of the young. The people clung to their old customs with all the more tenacity for the change in the political order. Meanwhile to the eye of the ruler, satisfied with the good he had effected, the tranquillity seemed to be absolute. The terror which in the following year was to sweep through the land, making the enlightened mad and the mild cruel, had not begun to work. Yet, to those who had the courage and wit to look below the surface, signs of agitation were not wanting. Fiery prophets rushed through the land predicting the speedy end of the new dominion; there were curious panics amongst the people and soldiery--curious outrages, put down at once, of course, and repented in dust and ashes; while sullen-hearted men, whose claims to dominion had been set aside, moved slowly through the cities of the Punjaub and the North-West Provinces, whispering to one and another that the measure of the stranger's tyranny was full, and that the times were ripe for revolt. One of these malcontents Tom Gregory met.