pay, and wore English uniforms.

The other road was a snake-like trail, nearly as wide but not nearly
so well kept. It twisted here and there amid countless swarming native
villages, and was used almost exclusively by natives, whose rightful
business was neither war nor peace nor the contriving of either of
them. It had been a trade-road when history was being born, and the
laden ox-carts creaked along it still, as they had always done and
always will do until India awakes.

But there are few men in the world who attend to nothing but their
rightful business, and there are even more in India than elsewhere
who are prone to neglect their own affairs and stir up sedition among
others. There are few fighting-men among that host. They are priests
for the most part or fakirs or make-believe pedlers or confessed
and shameless mendicants; and they have no liking for the trunk
roads, where the tangible evidence of Might and Majesty may be seen
marching in eight-hundred-man battalions. They prefer to dream along
the byways, and set other people dreaming. They lead, when the crash
comes, from behind.

Though the men who made the policies of the Honorable East India Company
were mostly blind to the moving finger on the wall, and chose to imagine
themselves secure against a rising of the millions they controlled;
and though most of their military officers were blinder yet, and failed
to read the temper of the native troops in their immediate command,
still, there were other men who found themselves groping, at least
two years before the Mutiny of '57. They were groping for something
intangible and noiseless and threatening which they felt was there
in a darkness, but which one could not see.