For a few wild hours murder raged through the streets of Cawnpore. Then the mutineers turned their faces towards Delhi. Had no malign influence arrested their march the great tragedy might have been escaped, and the word “Cawnpore” would not be to-day the most tragical cluster of syllables in British history. But at this point the subtle and evil genius of Nana Sahib interposed with dire effect. Nana Sahib—or, to give his proper name, Seereek Dhoondoo Punth—was a Hindu of low birth, who had been adopted by the Peishwa of Poonah, the last representative of a great Mahratta dynasty, a prince who had been dethroned, but assigned a royal pension by the East India Company. Nana Sahib on the Peishwa’s death, inherited his private fortune, a sum computed at £4,000,000 sterling; but he also claimed the great pension which the Peishwa enjoyed. The Company rejected that claim, and henceforth Nana Sahib was a man consumed with hate of the British name and power. He concealed that hate, however, beneath a smiling mask of courteous hospitality. His agent had seen the wasted British lines round Sebastopol, and reported to his master that the British strength was broken. Nana Sahib, too, who understood the Hindu character, saw that the Sepoy regiments in Bengal were drunk with arrogance, and inflamed to the verge of mere lunacy, with fanatical suspicions, while a British garrison was almost non-existent. Here, then, were the elements of a great outbreak, and Nana Sahib believed that the British raj was about to perish. He threw in his lot with the mutineers, but he had no idea of following them to Delhi, and being merged in the crowd that plotted and wrangled in the royal palace there. He would build up a great power for himself round Cawnpore. He might make himself, he dreamed, the despot of Northern India. He might even, by-and-by, march as a conqueror down the valley of the Ganges, fight a new Plassey, very different from the last, and, to quote Trevelyan, “renew the Black Hole of Calcutta, under happier auspices and on a more generous scale, and so teach those Christian dogs what it was to flout a Mahratta!” But, as a preliminary to all this, the great company of Christian people within Wheeler’s lines must be stamped out of existence. “The wolves, with their mates and whelps, had been hounded into their den, and now or never was the time to smoke them out and knock on the head the whole of that formidable brood.” So, with bribes, and promises, and threats, Nana brought back the Sepoys, who had begun their Delhi march, to Cawnpore.