Page:The Land of the Veda.djvu/459

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RESULTS VIEWED FROM THE RESIDENCY.
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was the new and wonderful reign of law and equal justice in the land of the Sepoy,

The public, shameless vice, that so shocked me when I last passed through these streets, was no longer seen. It had been told it must retire, and cease to shock virtue and decency by its hateful presence. The order, the industry, and the propriety of the streets were to me simply marvelous; and the people were so civil—making their salaam as I passed along, much gratified to find that I returned their courtesy. And this was Lucknow, with its hundreds of thousands of people, and I, a white face, alone and unarmed among them! I could hardly believe my own senses. But it was just so; and I felt that we might almost conclude that the city was already about half saved.

Yet there was enough to remind you of the savage and cruel past. The houses were all bullet marked, and some blown to pieces. There still remained the mud walls on the roofs, pierced for musketry, behind which knelt the fierce Sepoy as he so safely poured his deadly bullets on Havelock's men as they fought their way along the streets on which I was then so peacefully walking! I went straight to “The Residency.” No words could do justice to the change from what it was when I stood there eighteen months before! Battered out of all recognition, yet still a glorious monument of what brave men can do and endure in a worthy cause.

So here we stand, in the capital of the Sepoy, and on the spot where he did his utmost, and found even that no match for Christian heroism. Now let us, in closing this chapter, take our rapid review of results achieved by the valor so gloriously illustrated on this spot. The former and the present are here, and the future opens, while, before our face, old things are passing away, and all things are becoming new. We recognize the blessed changes; changes for which India herself will yet adore the Providence which refused her victory to her own ruin. God has subjected her “in hope” that she “shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.”

And, first, as to the great Sepoy Army. This military monster,