Page:The Marquess of Dalhousie.djvu/66

58 anxieties he found a moment to tell Dr. Grant of the death of the dog which had been his wife's faithful companion in her long ill-health. 'She lies buried in the garden here, and there are very few human beings whose death would make me so sad as the loss of this dumb old friend has done. You, at least' (Dr. Grant had attended Lady Dalhousie for years) 'will recall a thousand reasons why this should be so — and it is so.' 'My rest is destroyed,' he writes to the same dear friend on one of the last days of 1857, 'my appetite again wholly gone. I loathe the sight of food, and in spite of tonics, and careful treatment, with which I have no fault to find, I am low, languid, sick, deaf, stupid, weak and miserable.' Lord Dalhousie was now a confirmed cripple, able only to move about upon crutches; 'as deaf as the Ochterlony Monument,' he says, 'and as dull as the pulpit in the Old Cathedral.' 'It is just two years to-day,' he wrote in the spring of 1858, 'since I laid down the office of Governor-General; and ill as I then was, upon my word, my dear Grant, I was a better man than I feel myself at this moment.'

He knew full well by this time that there could be but one end to his sufferings. 'Beware, my good friend,' he writes in April 1858, on hearing of Dr. Grant's indisposition, 'how you follow my stupid example, and do not remain in India when your health requires you to leave it — either from a