him in his enterprise.  While his troops blocked up every gate, fire was, by accident, set to the fence of some man’s garden within.  There had been no rain for six months; and everything was so much dried up that the flames spread rapidly; and, though there was no wind when they began, it soon blew a gale.  The Sarimant was then a little boy with his mother in the fortress, where she lived with his father[3] and nine other relations.  The flames soon extended to the fortress, and the powder-magazine blew up.  The house in which they lived was burned down, and every soul, except the lieutenant [sic] himself, perished in it.  His mother tried to bear him off in her arms, but fell down in her struggle to get out with him and died.  His nurse, Tulsi Kurmin,[4] snatched him up, and ran with him outside of the fortress to the bank of the river, where she made him over unhurt to Hariram, the Marwari merchant.[5] He was mounted on a good horse, and, making off across the river, he carried him safely to his friends at Gaurjhamar; but poor Tulsi the Kurmin fell down exhausted when she saw her charge safe, and died.

’The wind appeared to blow in upon the poor devoted city from every side; and the troops of Zalim Singh, who at first prevented the people from rushing out at the gates, made off in a panic at the horrors before them.  All our establishments had been driven into the city at the approach of Zalim Singh’s troops; and scores of elephants, hundreds of camels, and thousands of horses and ponies perished in the flames, besides twenty-five thousand souls.  Only about five thousand persons escaped out of thirty thousand, and these were reduced to beggary and wretchedness by the loss of their dearest relations and their property.  At the time the flames first began to spread, an immense crowd of people had assembled under the fortress on the bank of the Sonar river to see the widow of a soldier burn herself.  Her husband had been shot by one of Zalim Singh’s soldiers in the morning; and before midday she was by the side of his body on the funeral pile.  People, as usual, begged her to tell them what would happen, and she replied, “The city will know in less than four hours”; in less than four hours the whole city had been reduced to ashes; and we all concluded that, since the event was so clearly foretold, it must have been decreed by God.’[6]

‘No doubt it was,’ said Sarimant; ’how could it otherwise happen?  Do not all events depend upon His will?  Had it not been His will to save me, how could poor Tulsi the Kurmin have carried me upon her shoulders through such a scene as this, when every other member of our family perished?’

‘No doubt’, said Ram Chand, ’all these things are brought about by the will of God, and it is not for us to ask why.’[7]

I have heard this event described by many other people, and I believe the account of the old pundit to be a very fair one.