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MURREE IN DANGER.

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organisation was at once arranged; the ladies and children collected in the barrack square; a cordon of sentries surrounded the station, and the three weakest points were held in some force; so the Dhoonds (the distinctive name of these disaffected hillmen), stealing up the hill-sides in the dead of the night, bent only on butchery and plunder, found the whole station waiting for them. So cool and fearless an attitude did the little garrison assume, that the Dhoonds thought discretion the better part of valour; and, after a few hours of skirmishing, slunk off, with the loss of two or three of their number, who, less cowardly than the rest, had trusted themselves within musket-range; and quiet was again restored.

“After the repulse of the Dhoonds, it was found that the conspiracy affected many more clans and a much wider extent of country than had been suspected. It reached far into Huzara and nearly down to Rawul Pindee; and, excepting the Khurrul insurrection in Mooltan, was by far the most extensive rebellion that has occurred in the Punjab during the year. Treachery was added to violence. Two Hindostanee native doctors in Government employ, educated at Government

* Succours also were summoned up from Huzara. At the urgent solicitation of Mr Thornton, the Commissioner, Major Beecher, despatched from Abbottabad every man he could spare; but before they could arrive the danger had passed over, having themselves been in imminent peril en route. They had to cross a most difficult country full of morasses and defiles. The Khurrals laid an ambush to cut them off, but Providence saved them. The road on which the trap was laid became impassable from the rains. The force turned off, and not till it had passed the spot, did it learn the greatness of the peril from which it had beeen delivered.-Mutiny Report.

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institutions, and then practising in Murree, were found guilty of being sharers in the plot. They were both executed There seems no doubt that the hillmen reckoned much on the support and directions they were to receive from their Hindostanee friends in the station, and several of the domestic servants were seized and punished for complicity."

CHAPTER XIX.

QUIET RETURNING THE TRIALS OF THE KING OF DELHI, THE NAWAB OF JHUJJUR, AND THE RAJAH OF BULLUBGHUR-THE REWARDS OF THE RAJAHS OF PUTTIALA, JHEEND, NABBA, AND KUPPOORTHULLA-THE PRINCIPLE OF COMPENSATION CARRIED OUT THROUGH THE PUNJAB-THE DISBANDING OR RE-ARMING OF THE REMAINING POORBEAH REGIMENTS.

WITH Delhi in our hands, Gogaira restored to order, and Murree safe, the Punjab government began to regain their footing. Not even in the mid-stream of the Poorbeah mutiny, in May and June, had they been in so critical a position as during the last few weeks, steering their course between the shoals of Sikh rebellion and the quicksands of Mohammedan outbreak. At length they began to "feel the ground," and to find it firm; and now they trode more safely, and could take a calmer, wider survey, of the dangers they had passed through of the crisis, and its consequences.

Arch-traitors there were to be punished; princely allies to be rewarded and honoured; loyal sufferers to be compensated, and losses to be made good; and some 15,000 disarmed Hindostanee soldiers yet to be disposed of, before safety could be insured. Such was the work before them. And with the restoration of quiet this work of retribution began.

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TRIAL OF THE KING OF DELHI.

Qui cito dat bis dat is a rule fully appreciated by an Asiatic; he understands the short shrift and a cannon's mouth, or a halter, for mutiny, and a dive into a bag of rupees for good service, better than protracted formal trials and long-delayed presents; and such had been the order of the day while Delhi stood out, and treason was rife. But there were traitors whose position and the magnitude of whose crimes raised them beyond the reach of such summary martial law, as also there were allies whose noble fidelity claimed honours and rewards which only the Supreme Government could confer.

Foremost among the traitors, of course, stood the old King of Delhi himself. He had surrendered on the solemn pledge given by Hodson, on the authority of General Wilson, that his own life and that of his Queen Zeenat Mahal, and her son Jumma Bukht, should be safe; but justice demanded that, though his life had been guaranteed, some punishment, only short of a capital one, should be inflicted on him, provided it could be proved that he had been no involuntary toolno incapable, unresisting dupe—in the hands of designing fanatics, in the work of rebellion and bloodshed during those four months of blood.

On the 27th January 1858 the solemn trial began. Before a special military commission-presided over by Colonel Dawes of the Bengal Artillery, "an officer of high character and attainments," and composed of members worthy to represent with him English honour and justice-appeared the old King, charged with the foul crimes of murder and rebellion. There sat the

TRIAL OF THE KING OF DELHI.

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last of the Moguls, on a mean charpoy (native bed), before his English judges, with the assumed air of idiocy or imbecility, in inane silence, only broken by an occasional irrelevant question or meaningless remark. Day after day, with unwearied patience, did the court, in its earnest desire to deal out justice, listen to the tedious evidence which sought in vain to prove the old man innocent, or rather irresponsible for the atrocities of his sons and the troops. It may be he was not guilty of the blood of Mr Fraser, Captain Douglas, Mr and Miss Jennings, and Miss Clifford, sacrificed at his own palace-gate on that ever-memorable 10th of May, or of the lives of the many victims, chiefly helpless women and children, who were that day cut down in Dariao Gunge and along the sands on the river-bank beside his palace walls; but the blood of those fortynine poor victims who, a week after, having surrendered on the pledge of safety, were hacked down by his fiendish sons and their bloodthirsty minions at the tank in his garden, within sight and hearing of the windows of his own private apartments, called aloud for vengeance. Then, too, the scaling-ladders supplied from the palace to help the crowd over the walls of the gallantly-defended magazine; the aid so readily given to that monster whom he delighted to honour, Muhammad Bukht Khan, late subahdar of artillery, and now made chief commissary of ordnance, and virtually commanderin-chief; the appeals to the native chiefs around, in so many instances, such as Jhujjur and Bullubghur, too successful; the ready welcome to all mutinous regi

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