Such was eminently the case at Cawnpore, yet General Wheeler seems to have known better.  While the European officers continued to sleep every night in the sepoy lines, the veteran made his preparations for meeting the coming storm.

European combatants were very few at Cawnpore, but European impedimenta were very heavy.  Besides the wives and families of the regimental officers of the sepoy regiments, there was a large European mercantile community.  Moreover, while the Thirty-second Foot was quartered at Lucknow, the wives, families, and invalids of the regiment were living at Cawnpore.  It was thus necessary to secure a place of refuge for this miscellaneous multitude of Europeans in the event of a rising of the sepoys.  Accordingly General Wheeler pitched upon some old barracks which had once belonged to a European regiment; and he ordered earthworks to be thrown up, and supplies of all kinds to be stored, in order to stand a siege.  Unfortunately there was fatal neglect somewhere; for when the crisis came the defences were found to be worthless, while the supplies were insufficient for the besieged.

All this while the adopted son of the former peshwa [Footnote:  Formerly a chief of the Mahrattas.—­Ed.] was living at Bithoor, about six miles from Cawnpore.  His real name was Dandhu Panth, but he is better known as Nana Sahib.  The British Government had refused to award him the absurd life pension of eighty thousand pounds sterling, which had been granted to his nominal father; but he had inherited at least half a million from the ex-peshwa; and he was allowed to keep six guns, to entertain as many followers as he pleased, and to live in half royal state in a castellated palace at Bithoor.  He continued to nurse his grievance with all the pertinacity of a Mahratta; but at the same time he professed a great love for European society, and was profuse in his hospitalities to English officers.  He was popularly known as the Raja of Bithoor.

When the news arrived of the revolt at Meerut on May 10th, Nana was loud in his professions of attachment to the English.  He engaged to organize fifteen hundred fighting men to act against the sepoys in the event of an outbreak.  On May 21st there was an alarm.  European women and families, with all European non-combatants, were removed into the barracks, and General Wheeler actually accepted from Nana the help of two hundred Mahrattas and two guns to guard the treasury.  The alarm, however, soon blew over, and Nana took up his abode at the civil station of Cawnpore, as a proof of the sincerity of his professions.

At last, on the night of June 4th, the sepoy regiments at Cawnpore broke out in mutiny.  They were driven to action by the same mad terror which had been manifested elsewhere.  They cared nothing for the Mogul, nothing for the pageant King at Delhi; but they had been panic-stricken by extravagant stories of coming destruction.  It was whispered among them that the parade-ground was undermined with powder, and that Hindus and Mahometans were to be assembled on a given day and blown into the air.  Intoxicated with fear and bhang, they rushed out in the darkness, yelling, shooting, and burning according to their wont; and when their excitement was somewhat spent, they marched off toward Delhi.