to render them invincible when they should cross bayonets with the dreaded white-faces. So they sharpened their weapons, lawful and unlawful, and awaited the day.
Meanwhile the more intelligent and elevated of the conspirators cautiously sounded the native princes of the semi-independent States, to enable them to understand what part they would probably take in the great effort. Suitable motives were carefully held out to them, and also to the nobles and military classes, founded upon freedom from annexation, restoration of ancient dynasties, the bitter payment of old grievances, with patronage and rank when the Mogul should have “his own again,” and be once more paramount in India. The Sepoys were promised promotion, higher pay, and better times generally; the Priests were assured of a deliverance forever from the growing power of Christianity, or even its presence, with a swift reversal of those enactments which had so seriously curtailed their dignity and perquisites, in usages and rites which humanity had swept away. The loose and vagabond classes (called “Budmashes”) were linked in with the enterprise by promises of license and plunder; and it was not a secret that they disputed together in advance as to the particular shares to which they should become entitled. Even the criminals in the jails were to become personally interested in the results. In Bareilly, where we lived, was the great central jail, containing nearly three thousand, the convicts of the province of Rohilcund, with its eight millions of people. These wretches, confined there for all crimes, from murder downward, understood that their time would come to be avenged upon the Government and the race that were punishing them. None can say now how we gained the information, only that “a bird of the air” would carry such a matter; but weeks in advance of our flight from Bareilly, the English ladies had heard that those wretched criminals, in their chains and cells, understood that they were to be let loose upon the day of the mutiny, receiving their liberty on condition of consummating the atrocities which the high caste of the Sepoys prohibited them from perpetrating. And, accordingly, let loose they were on that dreadful
