to the last drop his remaining vitality. But after a pause of ten days at Malta, he was able to continue his voyage, in the Tribune Frigate, and reached England on the 13th of May, 1856.
A pension of £5000 per annum voted to him on the following day by the East India Company, the gracious message of welcome from his Sovereign, and the cordial expressions of admiration by men of many shades of political opinion, for a time revived the spirits of the worn-out Proconsul. In September, 1856, he lost his faithful friend and physician, Dr. Grant, who accompanied him home, but had now to return to India. 'I felt very sad,' Dalhousie wrote to him in a farewell letter, 'when we parted at the station under the North Bridge [Edinburgh]: and even with the preparatory training, which your absence in the North has given me, I shall long feel strange, ill at ease, and altogether amiss in the absence of the kind and sedulous daily care which I have been long accustomed to receive from you. I thank you a thousand times for it all. My confidence in your judgment and skill was entire and unabated from first to last: and my gratitude for your never-flagging attention to myself, and to that dear suffering companion whom I lost, will remain in memory as long as I have memory left... Farewell, and God bless you. Write to me often, and never cease to believe me your sincere friend, Dalhousie.'
