Colonel Palmer, of the 48th Native Infantry, was in command at the Mutchee Bhawan; he called his officers together, and laid his plans with perfect skill and coolness. There was a magazine consisting of 250 barrels of gunpowder and nearly 1,000,000 cartridges; these were put together in a huge pile; every gun that could not be carried off was spiked, and at midnight the garrison filed silently out, and the fuse was lighted. The garrison reached the Residency gate without meeting an enemy, and just as the last man entered, with a shock as of an earthquake and a flame that for a moment lit up half the city, Mutchee Bhawan blew up. It turned out that a private of the 32nd was left drunk and sound asleep in the building. He was blown up, of course, but the next morning was standing, stark naked, hammering at the Residency gate, shouting, “Arrah, then, open your ⸺ gates!” Lawrence had thus concentrated all his force within the lines of that scanty patch of soil which was to witness a defence as heroic and stubborn as that of Saragossa against the French, or of Jerusalem against the Romans; and which for the next eighty-eight days—till Havelock’s Highlanders, that is, with blackened faces and crimsoned bayonets came streaming through the Bailey Guard—was to be ringed with the fire of hostile guns. What was called the Residency was really an irregular cluster of houses and gardens, covering an area of about thirty-three acres, looking down from a slight ridge upon the river Goomtee. In the centre stood the Residency itself, a lofty three-storeyed building with many windows and wide-circling verandahs: a spacious and comfortable residence, but singularly ill adapted for the purposes of war. The houses and gardens around it had been woven together with trenches and earthworks, with light batteries sprinkled at regular intervals on each front, and the external walls of the houses along the outer fronts were pierced with loopholes. But in the whole position there was not a defence anywhere that could resist artillery fire. The whole position formed a rough, irregular pentagon. What may be called the northern front looked down a gentle slope, and across a line of native shops called the Captan Bazaar, to the river, the north-western angle being prolonged, like the horn of a rhinoceros, to include a little point of rising ground occupied by a residence known as Innes’s house.