Barclay of the Guides

The great Mutiny embraced so wide an area, in which momentous events happened almost simultaneously in places far apart, that it seemed advisable to confine the historical background of this story to the siege of Delhi, the city which was the heart of the rebellion. In regard to the historical persons introduced, care has been taken to adhere as closely as possible to facts; and, where the romancer's licence must needs put words into their mouths, to conform to probability and their known characters. If the boys who read these pages should care to know more of the great men of whom they get glimpses, they will find a store of good things in Lumsden of the Guides , by Sir Peter Lumsden and George R. Elsmie; the Memoirs of Sir Henry Daly , by Major H. Daly; A Leader of Light Horse (Hodson), and the Life of John Nicholson , both by Lieut.-Colonel Trotter. The history of the Mutiny, as related in the pages of Kaye and Malleson, will never lose its fascination.
Herbert Strang
Ahmed, son of Rahmut Khan, chief of the village of Shagpur, was making his lonely way through the hills some three miles above his home. He could see the walled village perched on a little tract of grassy land just where the base of the hills met the sandy plain. It was two thousand feet or more below him, and he could almost count the flat-topped houses clustered beyond his father's tower, which, though actually it rose to some height above them, dominating them, and affording an outlook over miles and miles of the plain, yet appeared to Ahmed, at his present altitude, merely a patch in the general level.
Between him and the village lay three miles of grey rugged hill country, scarred with watercourses, and almost void of vegetation. A mile away, indeed, there was a long stretch of woodland, lying like a great green smudge upon the monotony of grey. It was a patch of irregular shape, narrowing here, broadening there, filling a valley which bent round towards the village. Ahmed was accustomed to shoot there occasionally, but he preferred the more exciting and more dangerous sport of hunting on the hills, where he might stalk his quarry from crag to crag, leaping ravines, swarming up abrupt and precipitous cliffs, always in peril of a fall that might break his limbs even if it did not crash the life out of him. For Ahmed was of a daring disposition, fearless, undauntable, yet possessed of a certain coolness of judgment by which he had hitherto brought himself unscathed through sixteen years of adventurous boyhood.