arms on the British, and the men directed to lie down near them; but scarcely had these orders been complied with, and quiet restored, when a sharp discharge of musketry, in the direction of the pickets, brought every one to his feet, and every soldier immediately stood to his arms. Intelligence was soon brought that the enemy were approaching in considerable numbers to attack the camp, whereupon troops were instantly ordered to advance to meet them, and, accordingly, a few companies of H. M. 10th Foot, the 8th and 52nd Regiments N. I., and also Wheeler's Irregular cavalry, pushed forward in the direction of the fire. The Sikhs opened a dropping fire of musketry, which was returned by our pickets, but after a few rounds, the officer in command thought it his duty to retire, and fell back on the advancing column, which, coming up, poured in such a rapid and well-directed fire, that the enemy immediately turned and fled, leaving, it is said, between thirty and forty men dead upon the field. The British loss was very slight, both in killed and wounded. Thus the discharge of a hundred guns in the allied camp, probably saved the lives of some of our gallant countrymen, and was often spoken of after as a friendly salute indeed. The Sikhs, it seems, intended mischief, and were going to walk off with no end of guns. They had come provided with artillery horses, ready harnessed, to facilitate the little matter, but they found it a nasty business. General Whish's army reached Mooltan in two columns, on the 18th and 19th of August, 1848, and encamped at Seetul ke Maree, in a fine open plain, to the north-east of the fort, and just out of range of its guns. On the morning of the 2nd, the first attempt upon Mooltan may be said to have commenced by the British, and the first parallel begun, at a considerable distance from the city walls. This first approach can scarcely be called a siege, seeing that no guns were ever brought to bear fairly upon the defences of the place. On the 12th of September a second attack was made on one of the enemy's positions, and although the enemy defended themselves to the last, and, firing through loop-holes in the walls, 'committed great havoc amongst our men, still the gallant fellows pressed on, led by Colonel Patoun and Major Montizambert, and carried the place by storm, putting every enemy within it to the sword. The British troops now began to suffer from fatigue, and men could scarcely be found to defend the trenches; and the officers were constantly on duty, many being in the batteries for forty-eight and even seventy-two hours at a time. Notwithstanding all these difficulties, the severe losses, and the formidable opposition the troops had met with, our gallant fellows pressed on without a murmur, fully determined to carry the place or die in attempting it. General Whish, seeing the defences were much stronger than had been supposed, and that the number of his troops was scarcely adequate to the task before them, necessarily became anxious for his men, doubting nothing as to their spirit and bravery, but justly fearing that long continued fatigue, would ultimately wear them out. To relieve this, he commanded the auxiliary force to move nearer his own, and measures were being taken for a more concentrated approach, and a more immediate cooperation, when the defection of Shere Singh, on the 14th of September, peremptorily put a stop to all operations, and the British and allied armies at once fell back to Soorajkoond. Major Edwardes's force took up its old ground at the above village, and the British encamped for a few days to the north-west ; but, the position not being considered a good one, the army fell back to a short distance, and pitched to the west of the irregular force, its right being distant about one thousand yards. At Soorajkoond, General Whish determined to wait the arrival of reinforcements from Bombay; and such reinforcements as would ensure success, at least, with which there would be no more retreating, no more falling back. And every one felt that in the second siege the place would be taken, or the army left dead in the ditch. Three months and more is a very long time to wait, particularly for an army needing assistance in the field. Three months and upwards the army had to wait, and wait it did. It is, however, a long way from Bombay to Mooltan, and as there was no help for the delay, the General wisely resolved to fill up the time in preparing for the siege. On the 1st of November, Moolraj having brought out six guns, and placed them in hastily constructed batteries on the eastern bank of the great canal, commenced firing into the allied camp. This canal or nullah, as before said, ran in front of Major Edwardes's camp. It had now become dry, and consequently not so formidable a defence as when filled with water. Its course is north and south. On the north of the allied camp, and towards Mooltan, the enemy had planted his guns, and, giving them an oblique direction, brought them to bear on the left of our position, and kept up a continued fire for six days. The allies opened between fifteen and twenty guns in reply to the Sikhs, throwing up a battery for six, four hundred yards in advance, on the west of the nullah, and another battery for three guns on the east. The British also erected a battery for four heavy guns to the north-west, and about eighteen hundred yards from the allied camp. The Sikhs, however, were so effectually protected by the western bank of the canal, that, notwithstanding the heavy fire that was kept up on them night and day, they could not be dislodged. Indeed their guns were so completely covered, that not one could be seen, and our shot either struck the first bank, or passed harmlessly over. The enemy now, emboldened by his success, brought some of his guns within six hundred yards of our camp, and a large body of infantry, which entrenched itself as it advanced. The enemy now redoubled his fire, and having got the range of our tents, rendered it exceedingly dangerous to remain in them; our little party was more than once startled by the shot passing within a few feet, and men were being killed whilst cooking their bread. It was, therefore, high time to drive the Sikhs from their positions, and, if possible, capture their guns. Accordingly, on the morning of the 7th of November, it was determined to attack the enemy, on the east and west of the canal, at one and the same time. About 7 P.M., Pollock proceeded to his post, and Lieut. Lake accompanied him, to assist in putting the irregular troops in order. A portion of these last named troops, not being to time, hurried down the dry bed of the canal, purposing to make a short cut, to join their fellows, and coming out of the nullah, abreast of our six-gun battery, and not answering to repeated challenges, Mr. James (now Ensign) immediately opened his guns upon them, at the same time the infantry poured a sharp musketry fire, and before the mistake could be explained, "Now, all our neighbours' chimnies smoke, Without the door let sorrow lye, We'll bury 't in a Christmas pie, And ever more be merry."-Juvenilia. 1622. FROM time immemorial, two conditions appear to have been indispensably attached to Christmas-that people should be merry and eat pies. It is easy enough to be merry where there are pies to be eaten, or the affluence which they are presumed to indicate; but we apprehend it is not quite so easy to get at the top of one's animal spirits where there are no pies, or the means of procuring them. And this suggests a seasonable consideration touching this fine old festival in its social aspect. There are two Christmases-the Christmas of the Rich, and the Christmas of the Poor. Need we describe the difference? Boars' heads, plum-puddings, roast-beef, mince-pies, burnt claret, wassail cups, and no end to games and carousals on the one handempty grates, naked boards, chilblains, shivering fingers, haggard faces and wolves' eyes on the other. So much has been written, said and sung concerning the merriment of Christmas, that it requires a little courage to say anything about its miseries; yet we take it that the very mirth and joyfulness of the time supply the best of all possible grounds for stopping to think a little about the condition of those in whom mirth and joy are killed by penury and grief. It cannot make us the more merry to know that others are wretched; but we can greatly enhance our own enjoyment by contributing to the enjoyment of the poor, who, without our help, can have neither pies nor pleasures of any kind at Christmas. And be it remembered that it is the peculiar property of all true delights to increase by diffusion, and that the more happiness we distribute around us, the more reason we shall have for being happy ourselves. Poverty is a dismal thing at any time; but it is a hundred fold more dismal in a season of general feasting and carousing. The force of contrast heightens all sorts of suffering. Starving is bad enough; but to starve in the midst of plenty is worse. The agonies of drowning are sufficiently severe-to drown in sight of land gives them additional intensity. And so it is at Christmas time with the poor. A man may starve and die out in the ordinary way, as tens of thousands do, without sign or struggle; but when the world is lighted up around him, and he is compelled to look on at banquets he must not taste, and to listen to rejoicings and shouts of revelry while despair is in his soul and hunger is gnawing the flesh from his bones, he cannot be expected to starve exactly like a philosopher. Now, this is the point which strikes us as being first entitled to VOL. XXVIII. RR attention when we are making preparations for the jollity of Christmas. Our own ease and indulgence, and hearth-stone gatherings, are not the only things to be thought of. We are pretty sure of them, and may leave them securely to adjust themselves. The traditions which come down to us with such stirring invocations to the larder and the wine cellar, also come down to people to whom larders and wine cellars are no better than a myth. Let us look a little after them. They have Christmas appetites as well as ourselves, and Christmas memories and associations, hearts and sympathies, and desires as strong as the best of us to collect their kindred about them, and dance the old year out and the new year in. When we have done something towards helping the needy to a flavour of seasonable comforts, we may turn with more tranquil sensations, and purer feelings to our own firesides and groaning tables. Christmas was not given to the rich alone. The poor have an equal right in it. Give them a little share of the revel, and your own feast will be all the more joyous from a sense of the joy you have created, and the tribulation you have consoled out of doors. Thus sang Poor Robin, that cheeriest of social philanthropists, in his Annual, precisely one hundred and fifty years ago :— "Good customs they may be abus'd, Which makes rich men so slack us, This feast is to relieve the poor, And not to drunken Bacchus. "Twill credit raise thee, God will thee bless, And neighbours praise thee." In spite of its transmitted injunctions to be very merry and eat pies, Christmas somehow throws a shadow of melancholy over us all. We may cry "merry, merry old Christmas!" just as the Christian world has been crying out any time for hundreds of years, yet we feel in our consciences that we are by no means as merry as we pretend to be, and that the cry is only a make-believe after all. Like all anniversaries it recalls extinct pleasures, severed friendships, faces that have vanished from amongst us, and that early faith in the gloriousness of life which never can be set up in our hearts again. Every recurring Christmas reminds us of the years we are burying under our feet as we journey onwards, until we come at last to look with less and less eagerness to the future, and to live more and more in the past. We run over all the bygone festivals, and end by thinking them all better than the present; and, with our enthusiasm thus diminishing year by year, we are fain to believe that Christmas is not what it used to be, because we are no longer what we were. But it ought to be some little satisfaction to us to know that while we are peeping over the summit of the hill, or descending on the other side, there are crowds of urchins climbing up its face to whom Christmas is pretty much the same it was once to us. Christmas is still Christmas to the young, who feel as we felt, hope as we hoped, and who have not the slightest consciousness of spectral faces glaring out upon their romps from the darkness of the past. To them, the glass through which they look is clear and bright-to us it grows darker and darker, until we see no more. Still we cry, merry old Christmas! And right we should; although we cannot conceal from ourselves that its glories are all but departed. We cannot afford to be as bountiful and roystering as our forefathers. Population presses too hard on the heels of industry. Notwithstanding the new Pactolus on the shores of the Pacific, and the golden disclosures of the Oural Mountains, there is by no means as much money in the world as there used to be, taking into account the increased calls that are made upon it. Modern forms and modes of society, too, are not so congenial to merrymaking as the modes and forms that prevailed in the happy age of mumming and morris-dancing, of city poets and lords of misrule; and we hope nobody will suspect us of favouring Popery if we add that the Poor House is not so open and hearty in its hospitalities to beggars and wayfarers as the monastery of old. With the extinction of the monasteries (for which we have much reason to be grateful, seeing what was extinguished with them) went a whole batch of superstitions, which effectively assisted the imagination through the hilarity of these festivals. First of all the fairies, being stout Roman Catholics, took their departure. They emigrated the moment England embraced the Reformation. This curious historical fact is attested by no less an authority than Bishop Corbett, who assures us that the good people never "danced on any heath after Elizabeth came in "By which we note the faeries Were of the old profession; Theyre daunces were procession." He conjectures that from that time forth they must either have gone beyond the seas, or retired into private life. A multitude of articles of belief went out in most places at the same time-such as the charms supposed to reside in the kindled log, the hunting of the wren, the winnow-sheet, the oxen dropping on their knees in their stalls on Christmas Eve, the going a-gooding on St. Thomas's day, and numerous other fancies and customs, out of which the popular faith extracted all manner of cures, gifts, blessings and love-spells. Our prose Protestantism has plucked out the poetry of the season, like Jack in Swift's Tale of a Tub taking off the lace, and converting his garment into a plain coat. It is only in Scotland and on the English border, and in some spots in the south and west of Ireland that Christmas is kept with a due regard to its ancient rights. Sometimes, to be sure, we discover that the form alone is preserved, while the spirit has evaporated, and that although certain usages are still honoured in the observance, they are no longer trusted with the destinies of the actors in them, who take care beforehand to provide against the contingencies of fate by regulating the issues for themselves. We have an example of this in the superstition of the First Foot, which ascribes to the first person who enters your house on the morning of Christmas-day a direct power over your fortunes. According to the legend, if the visiter be a woman, then all is to go wrong with you, (which leads us to suspect that the said legend is a relique of loveless old monkery); but if the threshold be first crossed by a man or a boy, then you are cast for happiness and prosperity through the whole of RR 2 |