Begumbagh

Begumbagh; A Tale of the Indian Mutiny, and three other short stories, by George Manville Fenn. This book of short stories is an excellent read in the usual Fenn style of suspense. "How does he get out of this one?" is always in the reader's mind. Most of the book is taken up with a story about the plight of the British members of a small garrison, during the Indian Mutiny. The second story is about half as long, and is a well written and extremely plausible story about a house owned by an old gentleman of ancient lineage, where there is a collection of gold plate which was said to be an "incubus", that is, the subject of a curse. As indeed there turns out to be. The third story is about a couple of smugglers who get trapped in a "gowt", which is the exit to the sea of one of the great land drains of Eastern England, constructed by that great Dutch engineer, Vandermuyden, in the seventeenth century. And the last story is about a new and well found ship, that nearly doesn't weather a severe storm in the Atlantic. The captain has taken to the bottle, and command is taken by a junior officer: the ship survives.