news was received in England with a delight that was mingled with mourning for the heroic and saintly Havelock, who sank and died on November 24th.  A soldier whose military genius had passed unrecognised and almost unemployed while men far his inferiors were high in command, he had so more than profited by the opportunity for doing good service when it came, that in a few months his name had become one of the dearest in every English home, a glory and a joy for ever.  It is rarely that a career so obscured by adverse fortune through all its course blazes into such sunset splendour just at the last hour of life’s day.

[Illustration:  Henry Havelock.]

Those months which made the fame of Havelock had been filled with crime and horror.  The first reports of Sepoy outrages which circulated in England were undoubtedly exaggerated, but enough remains of sickening truth as to the cruelties endured by English women and children at the hand of the mutineers to account for the fury which filled the breasts of their avenging countrymen, and seemed to lend them supernatural strength and courage, and, alas! in some instances, to merge that courage in ferocity.  Delhi had been deeply guilty, when the mutineers seized it, in respect of inhuman outrage on the helpless non-combatants; but the story of Cawnpore is darker yet, and is still after all these years fresh in our memories.  A peculiar blackness of iniquity clings about it.  That show of amity with which the Nana Sahib responded to the summons of Sir Hugh Wheeler, the hard-pressed commanding officer in the city, only that he might act against him; those false promises by which the little garrison, unconquerable by any force, was beguiled to give itself up to mere butchery; the long captivity of the few scores of women and children who survived the general slaughter, only, after many dreary days of painful suspense, to be murdered in their prison-house as Havelock drew near the gates of Cawnpore:  all these circumstances of especial horror made men regard their chief instigator rather as one of the lower fiends masquerading in human guise than as a fellow-creature moved by any motives common to men.  It was perhaps well for the fair fame of Englishmen that the Nana never fell into their hands, but saved himself by flight before the soldiers of Havelock had looked into the slaughter-house all strewn with relics of his victims and grimly marked with signs of murder, or had gazed shuddering at the dreadful well choked up with the corpses of their countrywomen.  It required more than common courage, justice, and humanity, to withstand the wild demand for mere indiscriminating revenge which these things called forth.  Happily those highest in power did possess these rare qualities.  Lord Canning earned for himself the nickname of “Clemency Canning” by his perfect resoluteness to hold the balance of justice even, and unweighted by the mad passion of the hour.  Sir John (afterwards Lord) Lawrence, the Chief Commissioner of the Punjaub,