followers. Let the reader picture to himself the situation. To wake up in darkness and find an enemy, whose numbers were unknown, practically in possession of the centre of the town, in the native inn of which he had gone peacefully to sleep but two hours before; his followers being shot down; some of them scared; all just awakening; none of them cognizant of the cause of the uproar; many of the intruders of the same nation, speaking the same language as himself; all this occurring in the sandy plains of India: surely such a situation was sufficient to test the greatest, the most self-reliant, of warriors. It did not scare Clive. In one second his faculties were as clear as they had ever been in the peaceful council chamber. He recognized, on the instant, that the attackers had missed their mark. They had indeed fired a volley into the caravanserai in which he had lain with his officers, and had shattered the box which lay at his feet and killed the sentry beside him, but they had not stopped to finish their work. Instantly Clive ran into one of the pagodas, ordered the men there, some two hundred, to follow him, and formed them alongside of a large body of sipáhís who were firing volleys in every direction, whom he believed to be his own men. To them he went, upbraided them for their purposeless firing, and ordered them to cease. But the men were not his men, but French sipáhís. Before he had recognized the fact, one of them made a cut at him with his talwar, and wounded him. Still thinking they were
