Some fifty Europeans and Eurasians barricaded themselves in a strong house in the English quarter of the city. The house was stormed, the unhappy captives were dragged to the King of Delhi’s palace, and thrust into an underground cellar, with no windows and only one door. For five days they sweltered and sickened in that black hole. Then they were brought out, with one huge rope girdling them—men, women, and children, a pale-faced, haggard, half-naked crowd, crouching under one of the great trees in the palace garden. About them gathered a brutal mob of Sepoys and Budmashes, amongst whom was Abool Bukr, the heir-apparent to the King of Delhi. The whole of the victims were murdered, with every accompaniment of cruelty, and it is said that the heir-apparent himself devised horrible refinements of suffering. Less than six months afterwards Hodson, of Hodson’s Horse, shot that princely murderer, with a cluster of his kinsfolk, under the walls of Delhi, and in the presence of some 6000 shuddering natives, first explaining, that they were the murderers of women and children. Their bodies were brought in a cart through the most public street of the city, laid side by side, under the tree and on the very spot where they had tortured and murdered our women. Mutiny grows swiftly. On Sunday night was fired, from the ranks of the 20th Sepoys, the volley that slew Colonel Finnis, and was, so to speak, the opening note in the long miserere of the Mutiny. At four o’clock on Monday afternoon the thunder of the great magazine, as it exploded, shook the walls of Delhi. Before the grey light of Tuesday morning broke over the royal city every member of the British race in it was either slain or a captive. When a powder-magazine is fired, the interval of time between the flash of the first ignited grain and the full-throated blast of the explosion is scarcely measurable. And if the cluster of keen and plotting brains behind the Great Mutiny had carried out their plans as they intended, the Mutiny would have had exactly this bewildering suddenness of arrival. There is what seems ample evidence to prove that Sunday, May 31, was fixed for the simultaneous rising of all the Sepoy regiments in Bengal. A small committee of conspirators was at work in each regiment, elaborating the details of the Mutiny. Parties were to be told off in each cantonment, to murder the British officers and their families while in church, to seize the treasury, release the prisoners, and capture the guns. The Sepoy regiments in Delhi were to take possession of that great city, with its arsenal.