And so it was. Every exertion had been made to ascertain the fate of my unfortunate friend, and it was now certain, Mr Churchill said, that all hope or chance that he survived was at an end. Nothing had been left undone, for in Bombay Hew had many friends; but there could be no doubt that he had fallen by the hands of these assassins, and now lay in some unknown desert grave. It was now certain, there could be no doubt. I eagerly asked if this was all; if they had no positive information of Hew’s death. Mr Churchill did not comprehend the extreme agitation of my grief. He thought me excited in my intense anxiety, and became again as blankly polite as before. They had no positive information; but the want of it, to those who knew India, was quite enough, he said, and all further search was hopeless. I was not sufficiently indifferent to be content with this. I left him to seek Hew’s servant, and to make another desperate effort to discover his fate. The man Doolut was a Parsee, and professed attachment to his master too extravagantly to satisfy me, but I took him into my service and immediately began my search. How long I remained engaged in it, and the travels and perils, and vain hopes, and blank disappointments, which I passed through while pursuing it, I cannot record. I become faint again, as I recall that time, when day by day the deferred hope sickened my very soul within me--I failed; most sadly and utterly failed; yet though the shadows of some thirty years have darkened over Hew Murray’s fate, and increased its mystery, I cannot think of it yet without a flicker of hope, a throbbing sickness of desire, that has well-nigh power to send me forth on the vain quest again. Living or dead, in earth or in heaven, Hew Murray, no man has ever filled your place in your old companion’s heart; and though I have had darkness enough in my own life to make me think an early deliverance from these earthly cares a blessing, yet would I give almost all that remains to me to know that you yet lived and breathed upon this lower world--to hope that I might look upon your face and hear the voice of your brotherhood again!