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fifty helpless soldiers and civilians, with several women, were shot down or cut to pieces within the walls of their prison-house at Patna. Ellis himself was among the fifty gentlemen who perished on that woful 5th of October, 1763.*

On the 6th of November Patna was stormed by Adams's heroes. But Kásim and the butcher Sumru had escaped the vengeanee of their pursuers by timely flight. Adams renewed the chase as far as the Karamnása; but before the year's end his prey had found shelter with Kásim's new ally, the Nawáb-Vazír of Oudh. Shuja-ad-daula refused to give up to certain death the fugitives who had become his guests. Worn out with toil and illness Adams resigned into the weaker hands of Carnac the task which he had brought so near completion. His own days, indeed, were numbered, for he reached Calcutta only to die.

Meanwhile a vote of the Calcutta Council had replaced Mír Jáfar, now old, leprous, and half doting, on the forfeit masnad of Bengal. In his readiness to resume even the show of power, the

* Broome's "Bengal Army," Chap. iv. Some of the bodies were thrown yet living into the well which served for their common tomb.

poor old man agreed to a number of conditions which left him the mere slave and tool of his

greedy taskmasters. He pledged himself to reimpose the duties which Mir Kásim had repealed, to exempt from those duties the trade of the Company's servants, and to pay large sums into the Company's treasury as compensation for public and private losses. In these arrangements Hastings seems to have taken no active part, nor did he soil his fingers with any of the money which his colleagues pocketed in return for losses incurred in the prosecution of an illegal trade.

The famous victory of Bakhsar, won on the 23rd October, 1764, by Major Munro, with barely 7,000 Sepoys and Europeans over 50,000 of Shuja's troops, including Sumru's highly drilled brigades, and numbers of those Afghan horsemen who had fought so well at Pánipat, brought Shuja's schemes of conquest and Kásim's hopes of vengeance to a disastrous end. In effect it placed all Oudh at the feet of the victorious English, brought Shah Alam a suppliant into the English camp, sent Mir Kásim a friendless fugitive into Rohilkhand, and drove the infamous Sumru to sell his sword to the Játs of Bhartpúr. When the welcome news reached Calcutta, Hast

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ings was already preparing for his voyage home. Before the close of November he had resigned. his seat in the Council; and soon afterwards he embarked in the same ship with his friend Vansittart for the dear home-land where his little son. lay dying, and his dream of retrieving the family fortunes had first been conceived.

AFTER a residence of more than fourteen years in India, Hastings returned to England, a poor man by comparison with other "Nabobs" of his day. Of the moderate fortune which he had scraped together, not a rupee appears to have been obtained by methods alien from the moral standards of our own time. While men like Drake, Clive, and Vansittart, were making thousands of pounds at one stroke out of the needs or the gratitude of native princes, while other of the Company's servants grew rich on perquisites drawn or wrung from native merchants, landholders, and placemen, Hastings seems to have

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kept his hands clean of all unworthy or even questionable gains. As Resident at a Native Court, and again as Member of the Calcutta Council, he had many opportunities of securing some of the wealth which flowed so steadily into the pockets of less scrupulous colleagues. To any one living in such an atmosphere of greed and corruption, the temptation to enrich himself by whatever means must have been very great; and Hastings, as we know, had a special reason for seeking after wealth. But his proud selfrespect or his native honesty rose above temptations by which Macaulay, in his case, has set too little store; and he came home with money enough to keep him in comfort, but with little to spare for the indulgence of his generous instincts.

Before leaving India, Hastings sent his sister, Mrs. Woodman, a present of £1,000. This, no doubt, was the lady to whose charge, in 1761, he had entrusted his little son George, for what proved to be the brief remainder of his young life. On his aunt Elizabeth, widow of his kind uncle, Howard Hastings, he settled an annuity of £200; a large and timely addition to her very slender means.