sphere. A prompter I have been, and a
prompter I shall die; for my name,
unfortunately, is Garrick.

Better to be bom with one leg, one arm,
one eye—better to be a foundling castaway,
without a home or a title, than to bear the
name of one of those great human monuments,
the standard celebrities of the past.

PERILS IN INDIA.

IN the records of endeavour and endurance,
published by our countrymen and countrywomen
who have borne the wrench of the
great struggle in India, there is one distinct
and gratifying feature: a reliance on
national sympathy. Brave deeds are
recounted without boast, every man telling of
the desert of his comrade rather than of
his own; women relate, with a tender pity,
griefs and sufferings of little children, and dare
to trust the simple tale of their own sorrows
to the ear of the great world at home. For,
let us revile as we may, our shows of coldness
and frivolity, yet we all know that there
is something at the bottom of all English
hearts, which binds together the great nation
as one common home for all its sons and
daughters. In that home there is always
sympathy, although there is not always help
at hand for the afflicted.

The last book published that contains a
record of the recent sufferings in India
is a little volume called A Widow's
Experiences in Lucknow. It is a record of
her great sorrow, by the widow of an army
surgeon who lost all her heart's treasure,
husband and child, in the contest. The
tiny book, with its great grief contained in
it, is formally consecrated to the memory of
those who are gone, and it is a record not
merely published for the information of the
reader (though it does inform him about many
things that touch his heart); but is partly
an expression also, of the craving of the
desolate for human sympathy, and of the
perfect assurance of that sympathy from all
true English people. Constantly we observe,
too, among these Indian books, in captain,
or colonel, or man-at-arms, as well as in
woman, the uprising of a deep-seated religious
spirit from among the tumult of great trials
and sufferings. The religious tone of nearly
all the journals, accords closely with the spirit
in which they are read. The work is done:
the grief is borne. The worker and the weeper
alike put their trust in the Supreme Disposer
of events. It is in such a day as theirs, if
ever, that men speak what they do truly feel;
and, as they speak, so are they heard.

We believe that the small library of books
built over the Indian Revolt, is a monument
worth any number of Egyptian pyramids;
and that men in England will look back to it,
often and often, from the years to come when
they talk proudly of their forefathers. Let
us trace, for example, the contents of one,
not calling it the best or the worst. It is
one stone of an English pyramid built in the
year eighteen hundred and fifty-eight; a
stone worth all the granite in the world.

Mr. William Edwards was magistrate and
collector of Budaon, in Rohileund, in the
month of May of the year eighteen hundred
and fifty-seven. In that month, after the
outbreak and massacre at Meerut, marauders
sprang up in Rohileund as if by magic, and
began to plunder on the roads, to sack also
and burn the villages. The magistrate in
good time sent his wife and child to Nynee
Tal, and remained at his post to do his duty.
He could double the district police force,
horse and foot, and show a bold front; but
disorder grew. In the Etah district across
the Ganges, immediately opposite Budaon,
it grew still more rapidly. Communications
with Agra, Calcutta, and the South, were at
an end. In the district adjoining Budaon on.
the north, revolted Sepoys broke a jail open;
and, from among the prisoners, let loose Nujjoo
Khan, a villain who, as soon as he was liberated,
set out for Budaon with the intention
of there murdering Mr. Edwards; by
whom he had been brought to justice. Mr.
Edwards was, at that crisis, the only European
officer in charge of a district with a lawless
population more than a million strong.
The nearest European officers were at
Bareilly, thirty miles away.

One morning, towards the close of May,
this magistrate was informed that the Mahometans
in this town of Budaon were to rise
at noon. He at once summoned the chief of
them to his house. They came. All of them
excited, many of them fierce and insolent. By
a judicious playing off of one party upon
another, they were kept in parley till the hour
of peril was gone by. During this morning of
perilous debate, Wuzeer Singh, a Sikh peon,
one of the magistrate's personal guards, stood
quietly behind his master's chair with a revolver
in his belt and a gun in his hand.
Wuzeer Singh had been a sepoy in the
regiment that murdered all its officers in
the church at Shajehanpore; but, just before
the revolt he had left his regiment and,
being a convert to Christianity, obtained
the place of orderly on the magistrate's personal
guard at Budaon; where there were
several native Christians whose religious
services (held in the magistrate's house) he
wished to join. Though but a new friend he
proved a faithful one. He has since received,
for his fidelity, during the rebellion, a life
pension from the Government of India, and
still remains here, in England, Mr. Edwards's
trusted and personal attendant.

Surrounded by great perils, distrusting the
other sepoys of his guard, and having reason
also to place little reliance on the native
police, the solitary magistrate of Budaon was
glad to see riding up to his door his cousin
and brother magistrate from the neighbouring
district of Etah, across the Ganges. The