abundant produce to itself. It acts not by exhaustion -it acts by fermentation." And with this glimmering of the certain glory, he a second time sent forth his favourite disciple and now beloved brother; referring to "the singularly prophetic aspect, not merely of the days in which we live, but both of Christendom, that region you are about to leave, and of Eastern Asia, that region of ancient idolatry whither you are going; for we can notice on that distant horizon the faint breakings of evangelical light which, like the dawn of early morn, may perhaps increase more and more till the drying up of the Euphrates that the way of the kings of the East may be prepared."

We find this note written to Dr. Chalmers before the address:

"BILSTANE BY LOANHEAD, Tuesday, 8th.

"MY DEAR SIR,-I thank you with all my heart for your very kind note of this morning. To receive from you anew in any form the address of ten years ago-the material of which became food for the white ants of Bengal, but the moral of which had been previously incorporated into my mental constitutionwill be to me an invaluable boon.

"I am grieved to say that I had a pre-engagement for breakfast on Thursday morning, of such a nature that I cannot suspend it. But, if possible, I shall endeavour to call on you between ten and eleven o'clock, a.m. I cannot express the gratification, the comfort, the invigoration of spirit which I have experienced in the very prospect of your giving me a parting address on Thursday, for to you I feel more indebted, as an instrument in the hands of God, for the impulse that carried me to heathen lands, than to any other in the form of mere man. With grateful, affectionate regards, "ALEXANDER Duff.”

Æt. 33.

ANGLO-INDIAN PARTINGS.

387

Dr. Duff preached his farewell sermon to his own. people, in the Moulin parish kirk of his childhood, from the text, "Finally, brethren, farewell." The services, Gaelic and English, lasted for five hours, and the crowded audience were in tears. On the subsequent Monday evening he met with them again, and, after a short address, shook hands with the minister in the name of all the country people, who had flocked in from the vale and the hillsides of Athole. Then followed the living martyrdom of Indian exile, the parting of father and mother from their four children. The birth of the youngest, a boy, only a few months before, had been to Dr. Duff a source of new joy and strength at a time of depression. Parents and children were not to meet again for eleven long years.

CHAPTER XIII.

1839-1840.

EGYPT.-SINAI.—BOMBAY.—MADRAS.

Waghorn and the Overland Route.-Dr. Duff as a Traveller.-Harwich to Civita Vecchia with Cardinal Wiseman.-The Light Wines of France.-Syra.-Alexandria-Muhammad Ali and the Church of St. Mark.-The Pyramids and Memphis.-Dr. Duff on the Pasha's Misgovernment of Egypt.-Interview with the Coptic Patriarch-Caravan to Suez and an Indian of the old School.Dr. Duff goes alone to Sinai.-Justinian's Convent of St. Catharine. Greek and Hindostanee.-A Christian Sabbath on the Mount of Moses.-Letter to his Daughter.-Suez.-Bombay.Meeting with Wilson and Nesbit.-The Differing Conditions of Western and Eastern India as Missionary Fields.-Comparative Backwardness of English Education in Bombay.-The Scottish Missions and Missionaries there.-Round Cape Comorin to Madras A Night with Samuel Hebich at Mangalore. The Scottish Mission in Madras.—A Cyclone at the mouth of the Hooghly.-Calcutta again.

THE Overland Route, a phrase which has ceased to have any but a historical meaning since the opening of the Suez Canal, had just been made a fact when, in the autumn of 1839, Dr. and Mrs. Duff went forth to India for the second time. On the ordinary roll of the English martyrs of science the name of Thomas Waghorn is not to be found. It has been left to the French to do justice to the memory of the man who, amid obstruction, obloquy and injustice ending in a pauper's death, first opened the British overland route to India in 1830. When M. Ferdinand de Lesseps created the consequent of that by cutting the canal

Æt. 33. LIEUTENANT WAGHORN AND THE SUEZ CANAL. 389

between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean in 1870,* his first act was to erect, at the Red Sea entrance, a colossal bust of Waghorn on a marble pedestal, with basrelief of the explorer on a camel surveying the desert, and this inscription: "La Compagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez au Lieutenant Waghorn." We have never passed that statue without a sense of shame-and of gratitude to the genius of the catholic Frenchman. In 1830, the quondam midshipman of the navy, who had become a Bengal pilot, sailed down the Red Sea in an open boat with despatches from Lord Ellenborough to Sir John Malcolm. He took four months and twenty-one days to make the journey from London to Bombay, because all the authorities except Lord William Bentinck scouted him as a monomaniac; yet he beat the Cape ships of the time, and his voyage was pronounced "extraordinarily rapid." For ten years thereafter he wasted his life and his means of living in attempting to convince the Company, which snubbed the Governor-General for sending the Hugh Lindsay steamer to Suez in a month; and to conciliate the king's Government, which sent Colonel Chesney to discover a short way by the Euphrates and the Persian Gulf. The bluff English sailor triumphed, but only to see all the fruits of his victory snatched by the Government which had scorned him, and for very shame at last threw him a miserable pension which was at once seized by his creditors. Thomas Wag

* In the eight years ending 1878, the number of vessels which have passed through the Suez Canal has been 10,988, yielding eight millions sterling in dues. Of these vessels 8,007 were British, which paid six millions sterling out of the eight. In the last year, 1878, of 96,363 passengers who passed through the Canal in 1,593 ships with a measurement of 3,269,178 tons, besides the many who crossed the isthmus by railway, 28,339 were British soldiers and 14,775 Anglo-Indians, or 43,114 in all.

horn died in the misery of debt, while the Peninsular and Oriental Company sent its first steamers, in 1843, along the path he had persistently tracked out. To complete the scandal, not seven years have passed since his aged sisters were driven to ask the public for support, while the Government which had so ruined their brother raised a revenue of fifty millions sterling & year from India and paid nearly half a million in subsidies for the postal traffic on his overland route. So it is that the Latin poet's experience is still true— "Sic vos non vobis." The bees of humanity make

honey, but not for themselves.

When Dr. Duff resolved to return to India by what was, in 1839, still Waghorn's overland route, he knew the story of the heroic pioneer so far, and he resolved to run the risk. "A man above the common for activity, energy and enterprise !" was his admiring exclamation then, before the eager life had been made a miserable tragedy by an ignorant country and an ungrateful Government. Hotels in Egypt, swift horse vans instead of camels in the desert, and a steamer with cabin accommodation for twelve passengers, were the marvellous facilities supplied by this national benefactor in such circumstances. Thus he had con

verted the nearly five months of 1830 into the month and a half of 1839 between London and Bombay, just as he pointed the road to the present reduction of the time to sixteen days. Dr. Duff had to find his way first to Bombay, at the request both of Dr. Wilson and the Kirk's committee, that he might comfort and counsel his colleagues there after the keen excitement caused by the baptism of the first two converts from Parseeism. His most rapid course thus lay from Harwich to Antwerp and Brussels, south by Paris to Marseilles, and thence by steamer to Syra, there to join the mail steamer from Constantinople to Alexandria.