English children. Hurdeo Buksh's brother
was unfriendly, and once was forcing the
helpless fugitives to cross the Ramgunga, to
their certain death, when a delay in preparation
of the boat postponed the departure.
Hairbreadth escape the tenth. A day or
two later, Mr. and Mrs. Probyn, each
carrying a child, and Mr. Edwards with their
baby in his arms, were wading, perforce,
through mud and water to the river, and one
breathless messenger from Dhurumpore had
ordered them back to a village beyond
Kussowrah,another afterwards summoning them
on to the boat again, when Mr. Probyn determined
to set off to Hurdeo Buksh himself,
and make a personal appeal. It was nine
o'clock in the evening, and the poor little
children were laid down to sleep upon the
driest place that was to be found on the mud-bank
by the water-side. Relief came in the
moonlight, and the children were carried
back to the shed, Mrs. Probyn tottering
the arm of a friendly thakoor; her bodily
strength being exhausted. False and true
tidings, false hopes, fruitless preparations
and false starts, followed each other until
the fugitives were sent, for better security
of their lives, to a small herdsmen's village
in the jungle. It was desired for better
concealment to retain the children in
Kussowrah; but what mother in such perils of
life, would be parted from her little ones?
All went by a painful night-march under
torrents of rain—partly through deep water
with slippery mud-bottoms Mr. Probyn
carrying his wife, each other man having a
child in his arms—and partly among thorny
bushes, to the wretched, solitary harnlet of
four or five houses in the middle of the waste,
of the adventurous and most perilous run
called the Place of Affliction (Runjapoorah).
The scene," Mr. Edwards writes, " was
desolate beyond description. As we came up
no one was moving in the village, all being
yet asleep. One of the thakoors roused up
the chief man, a wild-looking aheer, who
pointed out to us a wretched hovel which,
he said, was for the Probyns. It was
full of cattle, and very filthy; the mud and
dirt were over our ankles, and the effluvia
stifling. My heart sank within me, as I
looked round on this desolate and hopeless
scene. I laid down the poor baby on a
charpoy in a little hut, the door of which was
open, and on which a child of one of the
herdsmen was fast asleep. Poor Mrs. Probyn
—for the first time since our troubles
commenced—fairly broke down, and wept at the
miserable prospect for her children and herself.
Probyn was much roused, and remonstrated
with the thakoors, saying, ' If there is
no better place than this, you had
better kill us as once, for the children
cannot live here a few hours; they must
perish.'"

They were at last packed in a clean and
dry hole under a roof; forbidden to show
themselves by daylight. Fiction itself is not
more picturesque, and there are few narratives
of any kind more touching, than the account
given by Mr. Edwards of the experiences,
hopes, and sorrows of the English lady with
her husband and her children, and her
husband's friend in this place of affliction.

Once, Mr. Edwards had an opportunity of
sending, enclosed in a quill, a few words to
his wife on a scrap of paper an inch square.
There was but one stump of lead pencil in
the possession of the prisoners, with a loose
morsel of lead at the end of it. This dropped
out before the note was written, and
had to be anxiously sought among the dust
of the mud floor, and replaced and used
tenderly. When the note had been written
it was steeped in milk and put in the sun to
dry. A crow carried it off, and was pursued
by Wuzeer Singh until the precious scrap
that was to send peace to a grieving heart
was dropped. It was received afterwards by
Mrs. Edwards in deep widow's mourning, and,
when she received it, she went away and
clothed herself in white. We read how the
little baby died, and the poor father carried
it in his arms to a night burial on one dry
spot found among the trees. Again, there came
to them suddenly, on Sunday the second of
August, a tall, spectral-looking figure, naked,
except a piece of cloth wrapped round his
waist, much emaciated, and dripping with
water. It was young Mr. Jones, who had
escaped from the doomed boats that left
Futtehghur, and had been hiding in one of
the villages of Hurdeo Buksh. Strange
and terrible was the story he had lived to
tell.

At last the narrative ends with an account
of the adventurous and most perilous run
down the river to Cawnpore, where, safe at
last among the tents of Havelock, the
escaped victims heard, for the first time, that
they, four persons and the two children,
were the sole survivors of the massacres from
which they had so wonderfully, by God's
mercy, been preserved.

THE SMALLCHANGE FAMILY.

I WAS sitting in my office, near the
Stock-Exchange, rather late one afternoon, when,
happening to look over the wire blind
which covers the lower portion of the window,
and conceals my clerk and myself
from the public eye, my attention was
drawn to the figure of a gentleman coming
along the street at a rapid pace, who, after
passing the window, began hurriedly to
ascend the steps in front of my street door,
apparently with the intention of paying me
a visit. Arrived at the top of the steps, I of
course lost sight of him, owing to the thickness
of the wall of the house; but I could
see, first, half of a very much splashed right
boot, and then the same amount of a similarly
decorated left one, being put through
such a cleansing process as the invention of a