The deaths amongst the British multiplied fast. The fire of the Sepoys grew more furious. “The round shot crashed and spun through the windows, raked the earthworks, and skipped about the open ground in every corner of our position. The bullets cut the air, and pattered on the wall like hail. The great shells rolled hissing along the floors and down the trenches, and, bursting, spread around them a circle of wreck and mutilation and promiscuous destruction.” How fast the poor besieged wretches perished under this deadly hail may be imagined. A bomb, for example, fell into a cluster of seven ladies and slew them all in a breath. A soldier’s wife, carrying a twin child on each shoulder, with her husband by her side, was crossing a fire-raked angle of the entrenchment. The same ball slew the husband, shattered both elbows of the wife, and tore asunder the body of one of the little twins. General Wheeler’s son was lying wounded. His mother and two sisters were busy tending him, his father looking on, when a cannon-ball tore through the wall of the room and smashed the wounded lad’s head literally to fragments. One well had been turned into a sepulchre; to-day it is built over, and on the monument above it is written this inscription:— In a well under this enclosure were laid by the hands of their fellows in suffering the bodies of men, women, and children who died hard by during the heroic defence of Wheeler’s entrenchment, when beleaguered by the rebel Nana. Then follows a verse from Psalm cxli:— “Our bones are scattered at the grave’s mouth, as when one cutteth and cleaveth wood upon the earth. But mine eyes are unto Thee, O God the Lord.” The scanty supplies of water for that thirst-wasted crowd had to be drawn from the other well, and on it the Sepoys, day and night, concentrated their fire. To draw from it was a literal service of death. One brave-hearted civilian, named John MacKillop, described himself as “no fighting man,” but claimed to be appointed “captain of the well,” and devoted himself to the business of drawing water, the most dangerous task of the whole entrenchment. He kept to his task for nearly a week, and then, while drawing a vessel of water, was shot. He staggered a few paces, mortally wounded, then fell, but held up with his dying hands the vessel filled with the precious fluid, and begged one who ran to his help to carry it to the lady to whom he had promised it. Bayard, dying on the banks of the Secia, and handing the water for which he himself thirsted to another dying soldier, has not a better title to be remembered than simple-minded John MacKillop, the “captain” of the Cawnpore well.