suddenly fell on the holiday ship with its 600 souls. The doctors held their interview with the dead — two stabs from the same knife on the shoulder had penetrated the cavity of the chesty either of them sufficient to cause death. On the guest steamer there were hysterics and weeping; but in the ship where the Viceroy lay, the grief was too deep for outward expression. Men moved about solitarily through the night, each saying bitterly to his own heart, 'Would that it had been one of us.' The anguish of her who received back her dead was not, and is not, for words.
At dawn the sight of the frigate in mourning, the flag at half-mast, the broad white stripe darkened to a leaden grey, all the ropes slackened, and the yards hanging topped in dismal disorder, announced the reality to those on the guest steamer who had persisted through the night in a hysterical disbelief. On the frigate a hushed and solemn industry was going on. The chief officers of the Government of India on board assembled[1] to adopt steps for the devolution of the Viceroyalty. In a few hours, while the doctors were still engaged on the embalming, one steamer had hurried north with the Member of Council to Bengal, another was ploughing its way with the Foreign Secretary to Madras, to bring up Lord Napier of Ettrick, to Calcutta, as acting Governor-General. Uno avulso, non deficit alter. The
- ↑ Sir Barrow H. Ellis (Member of Council) presiding, with Mr. C. U. Aitchison, C.S.I., Foreign Secretary, and others.
