Neill is one of the cluster of great soldiers thrust into sudden fame by the crisis of the Mutiny, and is hardly to be judged by the standard of smaller men and of a tamer period. He was of Scottish blood, an Ayrshire man, with a vehement fighting quality, and a strain of iron resolve, which had come to him, perhaps, from a line of Covenanting ancestry. He was a veteran soldier, accustomed to govern wild clans and irregular troops, and had held high command in the Turkish contingent in the Crimea. On the domestic side, he was, as many stern and rough-natured men are, of singular tenderness. He was strongly religious, too, though he borrowed his religion rather from the Old Testament than the New. When the Mutiny broke out Neill found himself in command of the Madras Fusileers, a regiment which included many wild spirits in its ranks, but which, in fighting quality, was a warlike instrument of singular efficiency. Neill and his “Lambs” were summoned from Madras by the crisis in Bengal, and Neill’s best qualities, as well as his worst—his fighting impulse, his Scottish pride of race, the natural vehemence of his temper, his soldierly hate of mutiny, the wrath of a strong man at outrages on women and children, and his fierce contempt for the feebleness shown by some of the “arm-chair colonels” of the Bengal Army—all threw their owner into a mood in which he was prepared to dare anything to crush the Mutiny and to punish the mutineers. The Fusileers landed on the railway wharf at Calcutta, as night fell, on May 23. The great city of Benares was on the verge of revolt, and Neill’s “Lambs” were to be hurried up by express to its rescue. The station-master told Neill that unless he could get his men ashore in three minutes the train would start without them. But Neill was not the man to allow a railway time-table to stand betwixt him and the suppression of a mutiny. With an abrupt gesture, he put the station-master in charge of a sergeant and a file of Fusileers. The unhappy official shouted for help, but in another second stokers, firemen, and guard were in a row against the station wall, with a couple of “blue-caps” in charge of each. At the double the Fusileers came up the wharf, filed into the carriages, and the train, carrying the left wing of the regiment, moved off to Raneegange; thence the detachment was carried by bullock-carts to Benares. Leaving the bulk of his men to follow, Neill pushed on with the leading detachment to Benares.