Thanks to his measures, Wednesday the 16th found the force more fit to follow up its success, and that day ended with a considerable advance in regaining the city, point after point, against a resistance growing daily feebler. The arsenal was captured with a great number of guns. Next day again, still further progress was made; then up to the end of the week the assailants went on winning their way, street by street, to the Royal Palace and the Great Mosque. These spacious edifices, as well as the long-contested Lahore Gate, were easily carried on Sunday, the 20th, the mass of the rebels having fled by night through the gates beyond, leaving desolate streets, where the remnant of panic-stricken inhabitants durst hardly show their faces. [Illustration: Tomb of Humayoon, Delhi.] [Illustration: Ruins of old Delhi. Page 150.] Everywhere now prevailed ruin and silence over the captured city. For our soldiers, that Sunday afternoon might at length be a time of rest, their hard and bloody week's work done when the British flag flew once more over the palace of the Grand Mogul, and the Queen's health was triumphantly drunk upon his deserted throne. A wild riot of pillage and destruction ran through the famous halls, on which is inscribed what must have now read such a mockery: "If on earth there be a Paradise, it is here!" To this monument of Oriental splendour, the last monarch of his race was soon brought a humble captive. The old king, who cuts such a pitiful figure throughout those tragic scenes, refusing to follow the flying troops, with his wife and family had taken sanctuary in one of the vast lordly tombs that rise over the buried ruins of old Delhi, stretching for leagues beyond the present limits of the city. Time-serving informers hastened to betray his refuge to one who had neither fear of peril nor respect for misfortune. Hodson of Hodson's Horse, a name often prominent in this history, an old Rugby boy of the Tom Brown days, was a man as to whose true character the strangest differences of opinion existed even among those who knew him best; but no one ever doubted his readiness when any stroke of daring was to be done. The city scarcely mastered, he offered to go out and seize the king, to which General Wilson consented on the unwelcome condition that his life should be spared.