A HARD STRUGGLE 223 



Indian or Gaucho, reached us ; rumours passing from mouth to 

 mouth as they will in a wonderful manner over the most sparsely- 

 populated country. The first we heard was a report of war, a real 

 war-scare, such as might have originated from the fertile imagina- 

 tion of a Haitian journalist. The Russians were said to be 

 marching upon India, and France had joined hands with them 

 against England. 



It was but the barest outline, yet it shook and excited us out 

 there in the ends of the earth just as if we had formed items of a 

 crowd in Fleet Street. 



Following on this came that other heavy tidings indeed, the 

 death of the Queen. We took off our hats, and at first nothing 

 was said. The news struck each man of us. There was a sense 

 of loss and of the blankness of a personal calamity, which expressed 

 themselves at last in a few odd homely words. 



There, 7000 miles away, the abstract idea of the nation became 

 concrete. One had no picture in one's mind of England that did 

 not bear in the foreground, filling the heart and eye, that gracious, 

 royal, simple, noble figure, which for so long had drawn out towards 

 itself the highest patriotism of the race. The tumult of a nation's 

 mourning was taken up and echoed feebly here as in other remote 

 corners of the earth. Thousands of pens have borne witness to the 

 world-wide sorrow. No need to say more, but while I write the 

 scene comes back, as some moments of one's life will and do come 

 — the broad blue heavens, the wide lake, the wind, the smell of 

 grass and califate-bushes, the grasping after shattered fancies, and 

 the heavy acceptance of the hour assigned. 



