On the Face of the Waters: A Tale of the Mutiny

So the strain of months was over on the Ridge. Delhi was taken; the Queen's health was being drunk night after night in the Palace of the Moghuls. But there was one person to wh...

The letter, however, did not refer to Kate; though, curiously enough, the Englishwoman it concerned had been, and still was concealed in an Afghan's house. Kate, then, had not b...

They drenched Kate Erlton also, despite the arcaded trees above her corner as she sat with her face to the wall in the wide old garden. At first her heart beat at each step on t...

Kate Erlton looked with real emotion at a plate of strawberries and cream which Captain Morecombe had just handed to her. "They are the first I have ever seen in India," she wen...

The winter rains had come and gone, leaving a legacy of gold behind them. Promise of future gold in the emerald sea of young wheat, guerdon of present gold in the mustard blosso...

There was a blessed coolness in the air, for the rains had broken, the molten heats of June had passed. And still that handful of obstinate aliens clung like barnacles to the ba...

"For Gawd's sake, sir! don't say I'm unfit for dooty, sir," pleaded a lad, who, as he stood to attention, tried hard to keep the sharp shivers of coming ague from the doctor's k...

Sonny's liquid lisp said true. On this Christmas morning the veranda of Major Erlton's house on the Ridge of Delhi was full of beauties to childish eyes. For, he being on specia...

Three weeks had passed, and still the dream of sovereignty went on behind the closed gates, while all things shimmered and simmered in the fierce blaze of summer sunlight. The c...

The outer court of the Palace lay steeped in the sunshine of noon. Its hot rose-red walls and arcades seemed to shimmer in the glare, and the dazzle and glitter gave a strange a...

The cry was no more than that at first. To the rescue of the eighty-five martyrs, the blows upon whose shackles still seemed to echo in their comrades' ears. Even so, the cry he...

The five days following on the 2d of August were a time of festivity for the Camp, a time of funerals for the City. There was a break in the rains, and on the Ridge the sunshine...

The Gissings' house stood in a large garden; but though it was wreathed with creepers, and set with flowers after the manner of flowerful Lucknow, there was no cult of pansies o...

"Are you here on duty, sir?" asked a brief, imperious voice. Major Erlton, startled from a half dream as he sat listlessly watching the target practice from the Crow's Nest, ros...

Mrs. Gissing had guessed right. The man in the Afghan cap was Jim Douglas, who found the disguise of a frontiersman the easiest to assume, when, as now, he wanted to mix in a cr...

The silence of the city had lasted for seven days. And now, on the 1st of August, the dawn was at hand, and the rain which had been falling all night had ceased, leaving pools o...

No fuss indeed! Kate, as she sat in her husband's little tent waiting for him to come to her, felt that so far she might have arrived from a very ordinary journey. The bearer, i...

Three miles away Kate Erlton sat in her home-like, peaceful drawing room, feeling dazzled. The sunshine, streaming through the open doors, seemed to stream into the very recesse...

The song came in little insistent trills and quaverings, and quaint recurring cadences, which matched the insistency of the rhymes. The singer was a young man of about three-and...

It was a full hour past dawn on the 14th of September ere that sudden silence fell once more upon the echoing rocks of the Ridge and the scented gardens. So, for a second, the t...

It was a day in late September. Nearly six months, therefore, had gone by since Jim Douglas had passed the Bailey-guard at gunfire, and the English flag had risen behind the tre...

The days passed to weeks, the weeks to a month, after that shedding of first blood, and no more was spilled, save that of the shedders. Two of them were hanged, the regiment ord...

But in the main-guard, not six hundred yards off, where the very ground rocked and the walls shook, the men and women, pent up since noon, looked at each other when the first sh...

It was a quaint house in the oldest quarter of the city of Lucknow, where odd little groves linger between the alleys, so that men pass, at a step, from evil-smelling lanes to c...

The chill wind which comes with dawn swayed the tall grass beyond the river, and ruffling the calm stretches below the Palace wall died away again as an oldish man stepped out o...

Both voices came reluctantly into the persistent cooing of doves which filled the room, for the birds were perched among a coral begonia overhanging the veranda. But the man had...

The Western phrase echoed over the Eastern scene without a trace of doubt in its calm assumption of finality. It was followed by a pause, during which, despite the crowd throngi...

The Procession of the Hours had a weary march of it between the yellow sunrise and the yellow sunset of the 10th of May, 1857; for the heavens were as brass, the air one flame o...

"I entreat you to leave, sir. Believe me, there is nothing else to be done now. It will be dark in half an hour, and we shall need every minute of the night to reach Kurnal."

But if the schoolmaster of one school lay dead in the sunlight there was another, well able to teach a useful lesson, left alive; and his school remains for all time as a place...

"I can't think," said a good-looking middle-aged man as he petulantly pushed aside a pile of official papers, "where Dashe picks these things up. I never come across them. And i...

SIR: In reply to your No. 103 of the 20th April requesting me to report on the course of the Mutiny in my district, the measures taken to suppress it, and its effects, if any, o...