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180
WINTER INDIA

erent word heard, every sound unconsciously hushed by the associations. The climax is reached at the grave of Henry Lawrence, that great soldier who "tried to do his duty. May the Lord have mercy on his soul."

We turned away from the Residency door surfeited with sorrows. We could stand no more mute memorials of suffering. "What, memsahib! Will you not even see that cellar?" implored the guide, a chastened, tongue-tied soul since being informed that he would be dismissed with six annas only if he again addressed us as ladyships. "But the memsahibs all like it. We do it to please," he wailed. An old soldier, survivor of the scene, is guardian of the Residency, and he saw that we saw every bullet-hole and shell-mark, and visited every room down to the underground chambers intended as luxurious retreats in hot weather. The old veteran who had come in with Outram's relief in September, and fought through the second siege until Colin Campbell's final relief in November, made very real to us how a thousand people lived in that one building all the unusually hot summer of '57, with a plague of flies that covered the floors and walls and buzzed sickeningly over the people and their food.

We had then supped full of Mutiny horrors, and we broke with the program of sight-seeing and drove for hours,—first to the river bank where the dhobie-men were swinging, pounding, slapping wet garments with might and main, and spreading them out in acres of white mosaic on bank and common. We heeded not ruined Dilkusha, where Havelock died,