CHAPTER XI
Last Days
India was now at peace. The year 1861, so rich in troubles in the Western Hemisphere, was a tranquil one in the East. The Mutiny was in its last spasms. Ráo Sáhib, the nephew of the Náná, was making desperate efforts to keep alive the embers of Rebellion, but it was practically extinct. The year, however, brought its own anxieties. The monsoon rains in Bengal were of unprecedented violence. The Ganges, Narbadá, and Godávari, and their mighty affluents, swelled into raging seas, burst their banks, and carried devastation far and wide. Great tracts were flooded; crops were ruined; roads and bridges carried away: the homes—the livelihood of millions of cultivators disappeared. To this calamity succeeded an outbreak of cholera, which raged with especial violence in the Upper Provinces of Bengal and in the Punjab. Calamities of this order throw a great additional load of labour and anxiety on the head of the Government. Lord Canning remained, hard at work, till the close of October, when he started on another tour to the North. The most interesting incident of the tour was a Darbár held at Lucknow with the benevolent
