stopped, and, looking at the little gate in an attitude of intense admiration, exclaimed, 'How truly oriental! what wonderful taste these Easterns have in design!' She went on, and as Larking and I followed through the gate, he whispered to me, 'I got it out last week from Birmingham !'"

Bearing in mind Murray's early and consistent hatred of slavery, it was a curious combination of circumstances which rendered him the purchaser of one slave, at least, for the British Government. It came about in this way. A slave-girl, an Abyssinian Christian, having fallen into wretched health and apparently dying, was thrust into the house of an English resident at Cairo by a slave-dealer who was just starting on a journey and despaired of making any profit out of her. The English family treated her well and restored her to health, so that when the dealer returned from his journey and found the girl in a thoroughly marketable condition he promptly claimed his property. Naturally the Englishman refused to surrender the girl who had come under his roof by no culpable act either of his or hers; but the Egyptian Government supported the dealer's claim, which was according to law, and threatened to send a company of soldiers to enforce it. The English gentleman appealed to Murray, who could not interfere

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directly, as he could not assume that the dealer would maltreat the girl. He therefore applied for instructions, and received the following characteristic reply from "Old Pam." :

Viscount Palmerston to the Hon. C. A. Murray.

"FOREIGN OFFICE, August 5, 1848.

"I have in reply to state to you for your guidance, that if the slave-girl had been brought to the Consulate, we might have claimed a right to retain her, because the Consulate might have been alleged to be invested with the freedom-conferring qualities of British soil; but as she was left at the house of a British subject liable to the laws of the country, and as slave property is part of the Egyptian law, I fear it would be difficult to maintain that the slave-merchant is not by the law of Egypt entitled to have back his slave, or be paid for her.

"But it would be impossible to sanction the surrender of the slave; and therefore I hereby authorise you to pay to and charge in your accounts with this office a fair price for the girl, and then the British merchant may retain her in his service as a free servant, paying her the proper rate of wages.

"The price to be paid should be the value of the girl as she was when sent to the merchant's house, and it seems to me that £30 would be too much; £15 or £20 would be quite enough. But you may settle this as best you can.-I am, &c.,

"PALMERSTON."

The Hon. C. A. Murray to Viscount Palmerston. "CAIRO, November 4, 1848.

"Agreeably to your Lordship's directions, I shall pay the amount requisite for the liberation of the said slave-girl-namely, £35 sterling—and charge the same in my account with the Foreign Office for the current year."

CHAPTER X.

1849-1857.

MARRIAGE AND LIFE IN THE EAST.

It was during his residence in Egypt that the romance of Murray's early life was brought to a conclusion. It may be told in few words.

Mr Wadsworth, the wealthy owner of Geneseo, in the United States, died in 1849.1 It is not clear whether Murray heard of this directly,

1 Mr Wadsworth was a self-made man. Murray, in his volume of Travels, describes with enthusiasm the splendid estate he had won for himself in the fertile valley of the Geneseo: "Yet this scene, extraordinary and interesting as it was, possessed less interest to a contemplative mind than the venerable and excellent gentleman who had almost created it; for it was now forty-four years since Mr Wadsworth came as the first settler to this spot, with an axe on his shoulder, and slept the first night under a tree. After this he lodged in a log-house; subsequently in a cottage; and he is now (1834) the universally esteemed and respected possessor of a demesne which many of the proudest nobility of Europe might look upon with envy, where he exercises the rites of hospitality, in the midst of his amiable family, with a sincerity and kindness that I shall not easily forget."

but at all events there remains in his own handwriting an account of what happened thereafter. When at Dresden in 1864 he received news that James Wadsworth, the brother of his first love, had fallen in one of the battles of the great Civil War. That event brought vividly before him the story of thirty years of his life, so vividly that he told it frankly as follows to the love of his later years :

Hon. Charles Murray, C.B., to his Wife.

"EISENACH, 26th May 1864.

"After I sent off my letter to you by to-day's post, I took a long walk in these beautiful hills and woods. . . . Do you remember where we got out of the carriage and went up a narrow winding valley full of high beech-trees and steep overhanging cliffs? We only went up a small part of it, for it was too far for you to walk, but I followed it for miles-up to the very head, where it opens out upon a wild elevated chase from which one looks down upon the Castle of Wartzburg on this side, and over leagues of the Thuringian Forest on the other. The beauty of that walk is indescribable, and in the deep silence of those enormous beech-groves I reviewed all the events of my life connected with poor James Wadsworth. I remembered how I had first seen him in New York, when he was just starting for a tour in Europe with his young wife he was about twenty-five and she about twenty, and