This note worked its way through all the dangers to which the mails, then rapidly breaking up, were exposed, and managed to reach the seaside, and so on to its destination; a better fate than many of its successors had.
For more than ten days all moved on as usual; the mails came and went; Joel wrote and kept me informed how matters progressed till, seeing no further sign of danger, some of our party became impatient, asking ourselves why did we leave at all, and even proposing to return to Bareilly. It was, however, only the lull before the storm.
On the 25th we heard of the mutiny at Allyghur. Sabbath, the 31st of May, I preached twice (the first Methodist sermons ever uttered on the Himalaya mountains) from Acts xx, 21, and Rom. viii, 16. I tried to preach as “a dying man to dying men.” At the same hour in Bareilly Joel was conducting the service. He preached—for he had already begun to take a text—the very morning of the mutiny from the words, “Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom,” when, in the midst of his closing prayer, the guns opened fire, and the slaughter of the Europeans commenced. But we knew it not.
Our Sabbath passed peacefully over, while many of the ladies of our party were widows, and the mangled bodies of their husbands were then lying exposed to every form of insult in the streets of Bareilly.
Monday came, and no mail from Bareilly. We feared something must be wrong, and our fears were all verified by the arrival of the first of the fugitives in the evening, bearing the terrible news that at eleven o'clock on Sunday morning the Sepoys had risen and commenced shooting their officers. An understanding had existed among the officers that, in case of a rising, the rendezvous should be the cavalry lines; so, as soon as the firing began, each officer that could do so jumped on his horse and galloped to where the cavalry were drawn up, Brigadier-General Sibbald being killed on the way there. As Lieutenant Tucker, of the Sixty-eighth Native Infantry, was flying on horseback, he saw the Sepoys firing
