The Sun. — 1858-08-12 (London, England)

NANA. SAHIB as the leader and representative of the Sepoy insurgents—the dastardly perjury of the latter *hen he swore by his gods and upon the Gunge that he would protect the women and children, and see them safely conducted in boats to Allahabad—the butchery effected immediately afterwards by his ruthless mandate when the overladen boats were riddled with shot discharged against them when they were just in the mid-stream—the robberies, the cruelties, the devilries, all the imaginable and till then unimaginable horrors which followed, we know alas! asa nation long since, with only a too dreadful distinctness. The knowledge has nerved the arm of every soldier in our Anglo-Indian forces. It has given a more truthful accuracy to the aim of their rifles, a keener edge to their swordblades, a more resistless impetus to the thrust of every bayonet. Wherever the rebels since then have been encountered—no matter in what numbers, in what apparently overwhelming proportions—by the Merest handful of our troops, theyhave never failed to feel bitterly the recoil of that atrocious massacre upon themselves. They have long ago learned to curse the day when the NANA dreamt of indulging his tiger-like thirst of blood with this unparelleled act of perfidy and cruelty. It is from this point that the narrative of the assumed survivor would lead us on, rapt in attention, breathless, watchful, listening as she bids us track her from the foundering boat in which she noted the perpetration'of the deed of infamy—step by step through all the torments of suspense, of hair-breadth 'stapes, of brutal ill-treatment, of preternatural barbarity and inhumanity, on the part of the Sepoys, until the day when she first returned, under the shelter of the tattered banners and the strong arms of her conquering fellowcountrymen. Buffetting with the waters, scrambling ashore, crawling on hands and feet until effectually hidden for the time under the trees and brushwood—she tells us how she lay there thinking of those dear to her struck down together in the carnage, from which she describes herself as having but just then, as by a miracle, alone escaped. "My thoughts, oh Heavens! were agonising: my sister, her husband, and children, had, I had not the slightest doubt, been ruthlessly murdered." After lamenting and praying to Heaven for aid in her wretchedness, she tells us of her being startled by the unexpected apparition (like herself as a fugitive) of Miss WrIEELER, the General's daughter. And adds, that they have scarcely communed together for an hour when the rebels surprise them in their lair, and they are separated. The story thenceforth becomes sufficiently incoherent to pass for the vague and agonised remembrances of one who has prematurely traversed the Valley of the Shadow and returned to tell the 'horrors there experienced. Heartily glad shall we be to learn that the communication transmitted to Dr. KNIGHTON from one of the former alumni of Ewell is from first to last a cruel and harrowing fabrication. Better that a series of deliberate falsehoods should have been penned with the :most heartless affectation of truthfulnessby a morbid itrreamer of waking nightmares—than that the sickening tale of horror should even partially be the record of the actual sufferings of one miserable girlish survivor. There are, at any rate, divers in:accuracies of detail, false dates, mistaken names, and ara forth, that demand explanation. It signifies little wlether the explanation come to us from Surrey or ifrorE Calcutta, from the principal of the College at Ewell, or from his former pupil, the Judge of the SudsOrCearrt, at Alipore. Dr. KNIGIITON having adventured' boldly upon the course of giving his startling Pacquet of intelligence the advantage or disadvantage (such ao it may prove to have been in the end) of at *ll4, publication—it behoves him now to employ every means within his reach of proving or Oisproving its claims to authenticity. It is , -to merely idle curiosity which prompts this genera(:agerness for the discovery of its worth. There ai .e th,;usands cf the relatives of the victims of that deploraoe massacre at Cawnpore still brooding i n anguish over their fate, far and wide through du h ;e fair and peaceful islands, to whose grief the evade n ce of the truth or falsehood of the statement rece al tly transmitted from Calcutta, would bring ei ter fresh anguish Or some