As the morning advanced, the reports of the musketry and the tumult of voices grew more and more distinct to the ears of our countrymen. Nearer and ever nearer rolled the flames of the blazing houses, and the white puffs which betokened the presence of artillery. At length, stung by a generous impatience, Lieutenant Ashe took out his guns to reconnoitre, accompanied by some five and twenty volunteers. The party had barely gone forward a quarter of a mile, when they caught sight of the rebel van, which had already passed the canal, and occupied in force the neighbourhood of the bridge. Our people returned faster than they went, and not all; for one, at least, Lieutenant Ashburner, was never again seen or heard of; and poor Mr. Murphy, of the East Indian Railway, brought back with him a wound, to which he succumbed before the day was out. He enjoyed the melancholy honour of being buried in a solitary coffin which had been found in a corner of the hospital; and shared with one other, a lady who died of fever, enviable in that she was the first, the privilege of being decently interred within the precincts of the intrenchment. There soon came to be scanty leisure for funeral rites. At ten o'clock the mutineers fired their first shot, from a nine-pounder gun, which they had brought down to the vacant lines of the First Infantry. The ball struck the crest of the mud wall, and glided over into the smaller barrack, where it broke the leg of an unhappy native footman, who breathed his last in the course of the afternoon. This terrible and unwonted visitor, the precursor of many, scared indoors a large assembly of ladies and children who were sitting and playing in and about the verandahs; and sent to their posts the fighting men, most of whom had now their earliest experience of the sensation produced by the whizzing rush of a round shot; an ominous sound, which, ere long, became familiar to them as the click of the billiard-ball to a marker, or the buzz of the tennis-ball to an _habitué_ of Princes' Club.
And so the siege had begun. The first stroke had been played in that momentous contest, of which the stake was a thousand English lives; since nothing remained for our countrymen to protect save their bare existences and the empty shadow of the British rule. The first game had gone against us. The Nana had won the regiments; and the regiments had won their colours, their weapons, and their pay. Why needed they to grudge the losers their breath? Why, for a possession of no value, except to the owner, should they deliberately commence a hazardous and protracted match of double or quits? Power and authority, treasures and munitions, the sinews and the muscles of war, had alike passed over to the sepoys. What temptation was there to run the manifold public chances of battle, and incur the personal risk which none can avoid who bring angry Englishmen to bay, in order to destroy a handful of disheartened invalids and civilians; scarcely numerous enough to escort their women and children in safety to Allahabad through the perils of eddies, and quicksands, and bands of highwaymen recruited and emboldened in those months of general anarchy?