In the month of November we anchored off the Sandheads, having left England on the 9th of July, and never having sighted land the whole way till we saw the shores of India. We now received the astounding intelligence of all the horrors of the mutiny, and the perplexing news that Delhi was taken. Taken by whom? We had been so long at sea we knew nothing. In a day or two we landed at Calcutta, and our gallant ship, which had brought us safely out, was wrecked on her way home. Fortunately, however, the captain and crew were saved. When the Connaught Rangers first landed at Calcutta the great shock of the mutiny was being severely felt. Very few of us knew anything about the ways of the country, and we were, so to speak, cast adrift in a foreign land. We had great difficulty in procuring anything. I shall not enlarge on these troubled times. The generation that lived through them is passing away, and with them is fading the intense bitterness that the fearful atrocities of Cawnpore called forth--so utterly forgotten now that I read books that make high-minded remarks on the unforgiving spirit that actuated us in those days. It is better to forget; but the retribution was not too heavy for the crimes committed. In this country good or bad servants seem a very minor consideration; not so in India, where comfort is so essentially in the hands of domestics. One of our greatest difficulties in landing was procuring any. All the good servants had vanished, and for some time we were obliged to be satisfied with a very inferior lot. One of my brother officers got a man called Paul, a miserable little man, who was always getting drunk. When we marched to Cawnpore after the capture of Calpee, a great many men of the regiment got fever, and, among other officers, Paul’s master was very ill. The wretched servant got drunk in the bazaar, and was made a prisoner--at least, so it was supposed, for he did not return to his master, and no one knew what had become of him. Time went on and my brother officer got better, and _pour passer le temps_ either rode or drove into the town of Cawnpore to look at the place still stained with the blood of its victims. Either by chance or from a desire to see the sepoy prisoners, my friend arrived at the kotwallee or guard-house where these mutineers were incarcerated, and, to his great dismay, he saw among these ironed rebels a wretched little man, who shouted: ‘Me Paul! me poor Paul!’ Much surprised, he went to the kotwal and asked why the man was among the rebels, but could get no satisfactory reply. On explaining matters that most probably Paul had been locked up for drunkenness, and not rebellion, he got him released, as one of the policemen grimly observed, ‘just in time, for he would have been hanged in to-morrow’s batch.’ Paul left Cawnpore without much delay.