... Later he [William Armstrong] gave them [the pistols used in the Burr-Hamilton duel] to his eldest son, Henry, who was in the British army and used them in India, but when Henry was killed there the pistols were returned to my grandfather, who left them to my uncle. Commodore Salter. ...
... A family sorrow, bitter in its day, but carrying only a flavor of romance by the time I arrived upon the scene, was the death of my uncle Henry, my grandfather's eldest son by his first marriage. He was also in the British army, fought in Spain and was at the battle of Corunna and in the famous retreat; perhaps he was at the burial of Sir John Moore, when "not a drum was heard, not a funeral note." Henry was killed at the siege of Bhurtpoor in India — "leading a forlorn hope, blown up by a mine," I was told as a child. Bhurtpoor, the capital of the Jats, was a formidable fortress, and it took the British two months to reduce it, but finally, on the i8th of January, 1826, they exploded ten thousand pounds of powder in the chief mine and entered the city through a breach in the wall, incidentally losing six hundred men, among them my uncle Henry — but "the moral effect was deep and lasting," the histories tell us. The news was a terrible blow to his family. My aunt Rose told my brother Harry that they were all sitting at the breakfast-table when the Albion, a British newspaper, was brought in and my grandfather found his son's name among the list of the slain. ...
