We have been comforted by intelligence that the Ameer has released Allahdad Khan and all my people from the gaol in which he so unjustly and cruelly confined them.... The Ameer has lately been talking, we hear, of sending us away, and though we do not set much store by his words, we think it possible he may give us to the Russian Mission, who are about to depart.... I wrote you a longish letter on the 11th of this month, when I was in a high state of excitement, from fever and several nights of sleepless anxiety. The burden of it was an entreaty to the last effect regarding my poor people, and a hope that the British Government would seize the opportunity which the Ameer’s faithlessness had given them to come forward with Persia to put him down, and give his country to Kharasm and Kokund, on condition of the entire suppression of the Persian and Afghan slave trade in Toorkistan. If that paper (which I shall endeavour to recover) should reach you, compress its words into this purport and destroy it, reserving my last good wishes for the friends to whom I addressed them, thinking that I might not live much longer. I am now, thank God, almost well in health again, and the news regarding our people has set my mind at rest. Stoddart, also, who was suffering awhile from severe cold, is, I rejoice to say, convalescent. We are both in a very uncomfortable state, as you may imagine, having been ninety-nine days and nights without a change of clothes; but we are together. Stoddart is such a friend as a man would desire to have in adversity, and our searchers having missed the little Prayer-book which George Macgregor gave us (tell him), we are able to read and pray, as well as to converse together. God bless you, my dear John. Send my love to everybody, and believe me, Yours, ever most affectionately, ARTHUR CONOLLY.[210] To J. B. Conolly, Esq., Caubul. The passages omitted from this letter relate almost entirely to the services and the pay of Conolly’s attendants. There is nothing more remarkable in his letters and journals, written at this time, than his tender regard for others, and his forgetfulness of self. Not only did he grieve for the sufferings of his friend, and endeavour, by putting him forward as the real representative of the British Government, to obtain Stoddart’s release, or at least a mitigation of the severity of his confinement, but he exhibited, also, the tenderest solicitude for the welfare of all the servants who had accompanied him to Bokhara, and, in the midst of his own affliction, even on the bed of sickness and in the near prospect of death, thought of nothing more earnestly than the future welfare of his poor dependents.[211] On the 5th of April he wrote in his journal: