scattered over the vast plains of India, rises a solemn adjuration to the spiritual ear of Him that listens with understanding. Audibly this spiritual voice says: O dear distant England! mighty to save, were it not that in the dreadful hour of our trial thou wert far away, and heardest not the screams of thy dying daughters and of their perishing infants. Behold! for us all is finished! We from our bloody graves, in which all of us are sleeping to the resurrection, send up united prayers to thee, that upon the everlasting memory of our hell-born wrongs, thou, beloved mother, wouldst engraft a counter-memory of everlasting retribution, inflicted upon the Moloch idolatries of India. Upon the pride of _caste_ rests for its ultimate root all this towering tragedy, which now hides the very heavens from India. Grant, therefore, O distant, avenging England--grant the sole commensurate return which to us _can_ be granted--us women and children that trod the fields of carnage alone--grant to our sufferings the virtue and lasting efficacy of a _lutron_ ([Greek: lutron]), or ransom paid down on behalf of every creature groaning under the foul idol of caste. Only by the sufferance of England can that idolatry prosper. Thou, therefore, England, when Delhi is swept by the ploughshare and sown with salt, build a solitary monument to us; and on its base inscribe that the last and worst of the murderous idolatries which plagued and persecuted the generations of men was by us abolished; and that by women and children was the pollution of caste cleansed from the earth for ever! [Footnote 57: 'A sight to dream of, not to tell.'--_Coleridge._] [Footnote 58: Twenty-three and twenty-eight thousand of these two orders we have in our Bengal army.] * * * * *