Though never courting applause, and ready to incur odium for the sake of duty, he was not indifferent to the good opinion of others. With all his reserve, he was more sensitive to sympathy or to estrangement than was, perhaps, commonly supposed. He had not, during the middle stage of his career, much to do with the Press or the organs of public opinion. He was strict in demanding from all men a more than ordinary standard of work and of exertion, setting an example by his own practice. He was guarded, even chary, in awarding praise; still for real desert he always had the good word which was spoken in season and was valued accordingly. He never forgot that by training and profession he was a Covenanted Civil Servant, first of the East Indian Company and then of the Crown. No member of the Covenanted Civil Service was ever more jealous of its traditions, more proud of its repute, than he. No officer ever laboured harder than he to learn civil business proper, as distinguished from all other kinds of business. Yet he was by instinct and temper a soldier, and was ever studying martial affairs or acquiring military knowledge. He would familiarly speak of himself as the son of a soldier and the brother of three soldiers. Herbert Edwardes of Peshawur, who knew him well and was a competent judge on such a subject, wrote of him as a man of real military genius. The crowning grace of his rough-hewn character was a simplicity, the genuine result of single-mindedness. The light of religion shed a gentle radiance over his whole life and conversation. For him, too, the path of religious duty was brightened by his wife’s example.