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LUCKNOW
179

now. This is the Bailly Gate." "Gate to what?" we asked pitilessly. "Who was Bailly that they should name a gate for him?" The poor poll-parrot's only answer to such conundrums was a rigmarole about the size of the Residency. "The mutineers," "the rebels," "our forces," "the natives," and "the king's forces" rolled from his tongue without any mental effort. "Eighteen hundred people were besieged here for six months. Many died. More than two thousand of them were buried here." When asked to explain how two thousand could die if there were only eighteen hundred in the beginning, he whimpered: "But, your ladyship, let me tell you a little more about the Mutiny. Those poor people, how they suffered!"

One has rather too much of the Mutiny in India. It is decidedly overdone. It may be well to keep the great incident alive in native memory, along with the justly terrible reprisals; but the tourist gets sated with England's woes and foes of '57, and recalls other wars and sieges since, and trusts that the next generation is not to be harrowed with the sieges of Ladysmith and Mafeking, Tientsin and Peking. Yet that tale of English courage and endurance is so familiar to all of us, that none can fail to be deeply stirred by the sight of the battered Bailly Gate and the pathetic, roofless Residency—a vine-wreathed, eloquent monument, England's flag still flying night and day from the tower that never surrendered. It is the most eloquent, the most human and speaking ruin that I know; and in that beautiful garden not a voice is raised, nor an irrev-