“Why did you save my life?” Metcalfe asked his protector. “Because you are a just man,” was the reply. “How do you know that?” asked Metcalfe. “You decided a case against me in your court,” was the unexpected reply. “I and all my family had won the case in the inferior courts by lying, but you found us out, and gave judgment against us. If you had given the case for me I would not have saved your life!” Wilberforce tells another tale which graphically illustrates the wild adventures of those wild days. Early one morning he was on picket duty outside Delhi, and in the grey dawn saw two men and a boy hurrying along the road from the city. They were evidently fugitives, and, telling his men not to fire on them, Wilberforce went forward to meet them. When the group came up the boy ran forward, threw his arms round Wilberforce’s neck, and, with an exclamation in English, kissed him. The “boy” was a woman named Mrs. Leeson, the sole survivor of the Delhi massacre. She had been concealed for more than three months by a friendly native, and had at last escaped disguised as an Afghan boy. When the Mutiny broke out she, with some other ladies and a few Englishmen, took refuge in a cellar, and for nearly three days maintained a desperate defence against the crowds attacking them. The hero of the defence was a Baptist missionary, a former shipmate of Wilberforce’s, “a very tall and powerful man, with a bloodless face, grey eyes, a broad jaw, and a determined mouth.” One by one the men holding the cellar fell. Food failed, the ammunition was exhausted, and at last, behind the bodies of the fallen, piled up as a breastwork, stood only the brave missionary, with nothing but his sword to protect the crouching women and children. “Stripped to the waist, behind the ghastly rampart of the dead, the hero stood; and for hours this Horatius held his own. At last he fell, shot through the heart, and the bloodthirsty devils poured in.” Mrs. Leeson was covered by some of the dead bodies, and so escaped the doom of the other ladies, and at night crept out of that pit of the dead. She wandered through the dark streets, the only living Englishwoman in the great city, and saw, hanging up on the trees in the dusk, the headless trunks of white children and the mutilated bodies of Englishwomen. By happy chance she met a pitying native, who concealed her until she escaped in the fashion described, with more or less of imagination, by Wilberforce. CHAPTER IV CAWNPORE: THE SIEGE The annals of warfare contain no episode so painful as the story of this siege. It moves to tears as surely as the pages in which the greatest of all historians tells, as only he can tell, the last agony of the Athenian host in Sicily. The sun never before looked on such a sight as a crowd of women and children cooped within a small space, and exposed, during twenty days and nights, to the concentrated fire of thousands of muskets and a score of heavy cannon.