For several days he remained in this village, the people taking a kindly interest in him on account of his acquaintance with their language and customs; and the fact of his being a doctor also told in his favour. But then came a rumour that all the Englishmen in India had been killed, and that the King of Delhi had proclaimed it death to conceal a Christian. On this, his native friends hid him in a mango grove, feeding him by night on bread and water. Nine days of anxious solitude he spent here, burned by the sun, scared at night by prowling jackals, but hardly thought himself better off when a new place of concealment was found in a stifling house out of which he dared not stir. It being reported that horsemen were hunting the villages for English refugees, his protectors thought well to get rid of him under charge of a real fakir, who carefully dressed and schooled him for the part. Through several villages they took their pilgrimage, and the disguised doctor passed off as a Cashmeeree fakir with such success that he got his share of what alms were going, and seems to have been only once suspected, through his blue eyes, by a brother holy man, who, however, winked at the deception. After wandering for twenty-five days, he had the fortune to fall in with a party of English troops. Dr. Batson, we see, owed his escape to an intimate knowledge of the people, such as few Englishmen had to help them. His experience was that the Mohamedans were much more fierce against us than the mild Hindoo. But both religions had their proportion of covetous and cruel spirits, who at such a time would be sure to come to the front. Like wolves scenting prey, gangs of robbers sprang up along the roads upon which the unfortunate travellers were struggling on, often under painful difficulties; and many fell victims whose fate was never rightly known. Others, wounded or exhausted, lay down to die by the way. Those who contrived to reach a haven of safety, had almost all moving tales to tell of adventure, of suffering, of perilous escape--tales such as, in the course of the next months, would be too common all over Northern India, and would not lose in the telling. Many as these atrocities were, they might have been multiplied tenfold had the rebels acted with more prudence and less passion. So little did we know of the minds of our native soldiers, that it is still a matter of debate how far the Mutiny had been the work of deliberate design. But, at the time, it was widely believed by men too excited to be calm judges, that the outbreak at Meerut came a mercy in disguise, as it brought about the premature and incomplete explosion of a deep-laid plot for the whole Bengal army to rise on the same day, when thousands of Europeans, taken without warning and defence at a hundred different points, might have perished in a general massacre. FOOTNOTES: