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the Blue Nile, opposite Fedassi. They ended by imploring Gordon to send the Egyptian soldiers to relieve Saleh Bey. Gordon refused, and said he would do nothing till he heard from Sheikh el-Obeid. In the evening letters from Sheikh el-Obeid to me and General Gordon. He begged Gordon not to fight, saying it would ruin all.

"Feb. 25th. In the evening a Mejlis sat, at which Gordon presided, and it was decided to send out all the Bashi Bazúks, Shagiyehs, &c., against Wad el-Bessir. Gordon only consented on the Mejlis agreeing to send a letter to Sheikh el-Obeid, saying that the expedition had been ordered on their recommendation. The messengers from Awd el-Kerim state that if the Government do not send

assistance to him and Saleh Bey, he will join the rebellion.

"Feb. 26th. After some trouble we managed to get off 237 sick Egyptian soldiers. This is the first instalment of those bound for Egypt. It has been decided to send an armed steamer some distance up the White Nile. She will leave to-morrow. We have managed to make a parapet with sacks of dried biscuits. She will hoist a white flag, her mission being a peaceful one."

The next day Stewart went up the White Nile with two steamers to distribute proclamations and tell the people that henceforth the Súdán was to be for the Súdánis. The people appeared greatly interested, and spoke highly of Gordon. Stewart returned on the 29th, having ascertained that the Mahdi had ordered the sheikhs not to fight, but to collect men, arms, food, horses, and camels, and await further orders.

March 1st.-Gordon and Stewart hear that some of the Notables refuse to be appointed mudirs, having a shrewd suspicion that they are leaving the country, and being unwilling, by helping them, to displease the Mahdi.

March 3d. Copts and Moslems are leaving the city, and Stewart is told that at first there were

great hopes of the success of Gordon's peaceful politics, but that it was now thought they had failed.

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March 4th.-Stewart is busy 'pressing forward steamers for the Equator."

March 10th.-He is warned by a religious sheikh that most of the Sheikhs el-Beled and many of the Government clerks are traitors.

March 11th.-The Bashi Bazúks are busy building forts near Khartúm ; and hostile Arabs appear for the first time within sight of the city.

After this date there is little information with regard to Stewart. We know that he took an active part in the defence of the city and in the preparations for every eventuality. In one of his last letters he laughingly calls himself "Admiral and Chief Constructor of the Navy," and the steamers which met the British force at Gúbat showed how well and thoroughly he did his work. On May 7th Mr Power writes: "Colonel Stewart, with two splendidly directed shots from a Krupp 20-pounder at the palace, drove them [the Arabs] out of their principal position."

On May 25th he was slightly wounded in the arm whilst working a mitrailleuse near the palace; and on July 10th, when Sati Bey was defeated at Gatarneb, he had a narrow escape.

Stewart had the lowest opinion of the fighting qualities of the Bashi Bazúks and Egyptian troops in the Súdán. During his first visit to Khartúm he wrote: "Our defenders are fit for nothing but robbing and plundering the defenceless. . . . It is deplorable, but I cannot help feeling a wish that they may be defeated. Although it would vastly aggravate matters, still one cannot help having a wish of that kind." How little he then thought that he was

on more than one occasion to witness their defeat.

Gordon writes on the 30th July that Stewart's uniform had been captured at Berber, and recommends him for a K.C.M.G. In the same note he says: "If the route gets open to Kassala I shall send Stewart there, with journal -that is, if he will consent to go." On the following day, however, he had another plan, and writes: "D. V. we will send the Egyptian troops here down to Berber and take it, so that they will be on their way home; and I shall send Stewart."

On the 23d August he again writes that he hopes shortly to take Berber and burn it; and that Stewart would proceed to Dongola. Unfortunately this plan was abandoned, and Gordon sent his field army to loot the Sheikh el-Obeid. The result was disastrous; the field army was destroyed, and its fighting commander killed. This unlooked-for disaster, which осcurred on September 4th, completely altered the situation at Khartúm. The Mahdi was still at a distance; the city was provisioned for three months, and was in no danger of attack from without until the Nile fell. But with the loss of the field army there was no longer any prospect of successfully carrying out the evacuation; and the eventual fall of Khartúm, unless aid came from without, was certain.

Under these circumstances it became imperatively necessary to inform Government of the critical state of affairs, and so enable them to take such action as would save Khartúm and its defenders. Gor

don decided to send down the steamer Abbas, with his journal and letters, under an Arab captain. She sailed on September 10th, and with her went Stewart, Power (Times' correspondent), and Herbin (French consul). In Gordon's letter to Lord Wolseley, of November 4th, he twice says that he sent Stewart down. In his journal he writes that Stewart went of his own free will. He appears to have said, in so many words, to Stewart: "I will not order you to go down, for, though I fear not responsibility, I will not put you in any danger in which I am not myself. You can go in honour, and the service you will perform is great, but it is at your own risk." In his journal he says that he declined to order on account of eventualities which might arise. Possibly he thought that, as in his own case, "the subject was too complex for an order." It was evident that he attached great importance Stewart's arrival in Egypt, and he speculates on his progress and the result of his sudden appearance.

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We do not know Stewart's motive for volunteering to go down in the Abbas. His lips and those of his companions are sealed for ever. He knew that for the next two months Gordon would be in

no danger of attack. He was acquainted with everything that had taken place, and was in a position to advise Government, as no one else could, on the best course to pursue. He realised the vast importance of being in direct communication with Sir E. Baring and Government; and he no doubt felt that, if he once got down, the safety of Gordon and

1 The Mahdi only reached Om Durman on the 21st October.

2 When Stewart left London the only member of his family in town was his brother. In bidding "good-bye," Gordon said to him, "Tell your mother that I will not place your brother in any danger which I do not share myself." The words in his journal (November 5th) evidently refer to this.

Khartúm would be assured. This would have been the case. Speculation is idle, but it should not be forgotten that if Stewart had passed the cataracts he would have met Kitchener at Debbeh on the 19th September, that the Sussex Regiment reached Dongola on the 20th, and that there was then no force north of Khartúm that could have opposed the march of 500 British troops. Looking at all the circumstances, we consider that Stewart was justified in coming down in the Abbas, even though he was not ordered to do so, and that when he left Khartúm he was guided by no unworthy motive, and went "in honour."1

The progress of the ill-fated Abbas to the evening of the 14th September, when she was four miles south of Berber, is described in the last letter Stewart wrote to Gordon. The two escorting steamers, after seeing the Abbas past Berber, turned back, and a Mahdist steamer started in pursuit. Close to the 5th cataract two of Stewart's boats, with twelve Greeks, were captured; but afterwards all went well till the morning of the 17th. At 9 A.M. the Abbas struck on a sunken rock, and was hopelessly disabled. Stewart landed the stores and men, spiked the gun, and threw the ammunition overboard. What followed has been described, from the accounts of survivors, by Sir H. Colvile in the 'History of the Súdán Campaign.' It would appear that Stewart and his two companions were, on some pretext, enticed into the house of Fakri Wad Etman at Hebba. There they were foully murdered by Suleiman Wad Gamr, a Monasir sheikh who had been appointed one of the Council at Berber, and

who may have seen Stewart when the secret firman was read. Stewart, with the desert on either side of him, and nothing but an occasional group of huts on the bank, probably assumed that all danger was over. Perhaps also Suleiman lulled suspicion by telling him of the Mudir of Dongola's victory at Korti on the 11th, and that he had submitted to Government.

There is strong reason to suppose, from the peculiar shape of the river at this point, that the steamer was wrecked on purpose. The Arabs knew that she was being sent down with Europeans, and Gordon appears to have thought that either Faraj (Ferragh) Pasha, or Awám, one of his clerks, had sent information to the Mahdists. Amongst the passengers was a messenger who had been sent by Zobeir to Khartúm, and who is said to have escaped after having been robbed of his papers.

Stewart, in Gordon's words, was "a brave, just, upright gentleman." He acted as such throughout his brief life; and by his death England lost one who, had his life been spared, might have rendered her important services. In the words of one well qualified to give an opinion, when Stewart was killed "the army lost a gallant soldier and the Queen an able public servant. His like is not often to be found, and it may justly be said that his death was a serious national loss when it occurred."

Stewart's comrades and personal friends, who have placed monuments to his memory in St Patrick's Cathedral, and in the Chapel of his old school, Cheltenham College, may rest assured that he too, like Gordon, tried, under all circumstances, "to do his duty."

1 Many years previously Gordon had placed an officer in a very similar position. He would give no order, but the officer left, and Gordon fully approved of his doing so.

SOME PLANTATION MEMORIES.

property, and the negroes, though no longer slaves, were still there as labourers to work it upon terms that were, in fact, more favourable to all parties than slave labour. The actual paralysis that followed the war was over. Landowners had scraped together stock and implements, and made arrangements with the newly freed negroes to work their lands, and the same generation that had lived together in a kindly fashion as masters and slaves settled down as master and servant. Above all, the prices of tobacco and grain were high, and the material outlook seemed upon the whole promising.

IN the whole of Virginia-and But the latter still had their that is saying much indeed-there was no more glorious prospect than the one upon which our plantation looked out. Around us spread, in pleasant undulations of fallow and forest, of tillage and pasture, the warm, rich coloured but ragged landscape where Virginian homesteads, gentle and simple, lay supinely amid their groves and apple-orchards. Behind us the incomparable peaks of the Blue Ridge Mountains lifted their heads many thousands of feet into the sky. Before us a tributary range, scarcely less beautiful, if less majestic, spread heavenwards a boundless sea of woodland upon which the bloom of spring, the lush greenery of summer, the fire of autumn, the white terror of winter, proclaimed in a succession of splendid pageants the flight of our placid lives.

These mountains, however, had but recently looked upon scenes that

were sufficiently stirring. For it was in the period immediately following the war that the plantation known then as the "Old Robertson Place" came into our hands. From that vantagepoint we witnessed, and indeed partook in what may in one sense be called, the close of the old Southern life.

Historically and financially the long tale of the Slave States ended, as every one knows, with the surrender of Lee in April 1865. But for many years after that the same people in most parts of Virginia, both white and black, that had lived under the "Institution" and fought in defence of it, were still upon the land. The blacks were free, the whites were ruined in a sense - it is true.

Our plantation (the very phrase nowadays is old-fashioned in Virginia) lay "'way back" from the railroad.

Fifteen miles of a road such as no civilised community outside the Southern States could have even contemplated without dismay, lay between us and the station. No one but a Virginian, or some one broken in to the Virginia attitude towards roads, would have dared to venture over ours upon wheels. And yet our neighbours had traversed it cheerfully for generations, and saw nothing seriously amiss with it. The wrecks of waggons and bullock-carts, the fragments of wheels and broken shafts, that marked its course with such terrible significance, had no alarms for the native-they were all in the day's work. The Virginia of slavery days, east of the Blue Ridge at any rate, had never grasped the conception of what road-making meant. In Mashonaland, in the Rocky Mountains, in the far backwoods of Canada, a primitive highway is the natural accom

even

paniment of the dawn of civilisation. But Virginia is the oldest community of Englishmen outside England. It is an ancient and a distinguished province. For over two centuries it has had something like a territorial aristocracy living upon its soil. Their pleasures and their interests have been wholly rural. No people have ever existed in the wide world to whom country locomotion was more important. And yet in most parts, not only till the Civil War but up to this very day, the twohorse plough has been the only factor in road mending and construction. Over these unspeakable tracks of mud, pleasantly broken by slabs of rock and wandering treeroots, it was not only the waggon of rural commerce that had to jolt, but the family coach itself to rock and stagger on its way to dance or wedding, to church or merry-making and with what loss of dignity can be well imagined. These old relics of past splendour (as the word is used in Virginia), with their leather springs, have long vanished now. But I can recall many a venerable specimen that survived the war, and can see them even now writhing in all the agonies of a bottomless mudhole, the negro coachman craning forward with loud shouts of wonderfully worded exhortations to his struggling horses. It was many years before these rickety emblems of ante-bellum dignity disappeared entirely from the road. One after another they made their final trip to the village wheelwright, to be hopelessly condemned even by that resourceful functionary, and left, perchance, to rot upon the wayside amid the wreck of humbler machinery. Much sorrowful consolation, I have reason to think, was afforded by these bleaching skeletons to the ex-family retainer

as he passed by with his mule- or his ox-cart, and dropped the tributary tear to the ghost of the old family conveyance, which he had once steered with such éclat. Some of these old carcasses survive to this very day-in remote corners of barnyards and orchards-buried in briers and weeds, a harbour of refuge for the "broody" hen and roosting turkey. Our road, it was true, was perhaps the worst, if there could be a worst, in the county. It was lifted for a considerable part of its course off the red clay of the lower country, and wound its tortuous way over the shoulder of mountain-spurs, where the winter rains did not stand, but tore into atoms every feeble effort that was made to soften the natural obstacles of rock and gully. It was a road that would have made even a Rocky Mountain teamster hold his breath. But our local patriots were quite equal to the occasion, and used to declare, when twitted by people who were fortunate enough to live off it, that it was, at least, a fine winter road. That is to say, you couldn't sink permanently into a mud-hole-you either broke your neck or got over it. But then, again, it was almost as bad in summer; whereas in the lower country, when the mud hardened on the track, a reckless driver with a fast horse and a strong buggy could make five miles an hour with luck.

Our neighbourhood was beyond doubt a bit isolated, and this perhaps accounted for the fact of oldtime ideas dying harder than in other parts with which I am familiar-particularly among the negroes. Of these, great numbers of the best of the old régime were still, at the time I write of, living and in their prime, and some of them were in every sense as reliable and as trustworthy as good

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