Things were going from bad to worse, and the magistrate saw he must lose no time in getting rid of the fellow; so, with a threat that, if ever he found him in his Bazaar again he would hand him up for court martial, he said to the guard, “Take him away!” and off he was walked, to the great relief of the Nawab, and the Jamadar, and all the natives present, and I suppose to Mr. Wood as well. And this was in Lucknow, and only ten months after its recapture!
Solomon says, “There is a time to laugh.” I have found in my life few occasions more appropriate for that exercise than the one here given, which I have faithfully described as it occurred. It is allowable occasionally to pass
“From grave to gay,
From lively to severe.”
My book has more than enough of the grave and the sad; let this, then, have a place here, for here it belongs, and has a lesson far beyond what appears on the surface of this ludicrous scene. I have introduced it, not for the sake of its levity, though it was rich and almost inimitable, but for the sake of its lesson. One can read that lesson, and even laugh over it, as I did, near the graves of Havelock and Henry Lawrence. Laughter may be religious. It was so here. To adequately appreciate the enlargement of heart, or even the hilarity of that occasion, one would need to have experimentally known our previous conditions there—to have ridden on an elephant's back, with a Sepoy guard, through those very Bazaars of vice and danger—should have been, as we were, acquainted with those who endured there that long agony of the defense—must have stood with us for seven months on the summit of Nynee Tal, with the fear that you were the last of the Christian life left in India, and that our fate, at the hands of these bloody men, might be but a question of time, while our only hope, under God, were these very red-coated soldiers whom we feared might yet be ten thousand miles away from us. A “dying hope,” no relief, and hardly expecting deliverance, and then to drop right out of those circumstances into a scene like this! The blessed God himself would
