were prepared in the Government factory at Dam-Dam, one of the suburbs of Calcutta. The practice with the old paper cartridges, used with the old musket, the 'Brown Bess,' already referred to, had been to bite off the paper at one end previous to ramming it down the barrel. When the conspirators suddenly lighted upon the new cartridge, not only smeared, but smeared with the fat of the hog or the cow, the one hateful to the Muhammadans, the other the sacred animal of the Hindus, they recognised that they had found a weapon potent enough to rouse to action the armed men of the races which professed those religions. What could be easier than to persuade the sipáhís that the greasing of the new cartridges was a well-thought-out scheme to deprive the Hindu of his caste, to degrade the Muhammadan?
If the minds of the sipáhís had not been excited and rendered suspicious of their foreign masters by the occurrences to which I have adverted, the tale told by the conspirators would have failed to affect them. For, after all, they, up to January 1857, had had no experience of the greased cartridges. A new musket had been partially issued, and a certain number of sipáhís from each regiment at Barrackpur were being instructed in its use at Dam-Dam. But up to that period no greased cartridges had been issued. The secret of their preparation was, however, disclosed in January, by a lascar employed in their manufacture to a sipáhí, and the story, once set rolling, spread with indescribable celerity. In the olden days, the days before the confidence between the sipáhí and his officer had been broken, the sipáhí would at once have asked his officer the reason for the change. But, in 1857, they sullenly accepted the story. They had been told that the object of their foreign masters was to make them all Christians. The first step in the course to Christianity was to deprive them of their caste,
