“I do not trust to his promise of candour; convinced that he is incapable of it, and that his sole purpose and wish are to embarrass and defeat every measure which I may undertake or which may tend even to promote the public interest if my credit is connected with them.... Every disappointment and misfortune have been aggravated by him, and every fabricated tale of armies devoted to famine and massacre have found their first and most ready way to his office, where it is known they would meet with most welcome reception.... I judge of his public conduct by my experience of his private, which I have found void of truth and honour. This is a severe charge but temperately and deliberately made.” These were not words which a man in those days could write without taking his chance of a bullet or the point of a small-sword, and Hastings knew this perfectly well. Francis challenged him on the spot, and the day but one after they confronted each other with pistols at fourteen paces. Francis’s pistol missed fire, and Hastings obligingly waited until he had reprimed. The second time the pistol went off, but the ball flew wide. Hastings returned it very deliberately and his enemy went down with a bullet in the right side. [Illustration: HIS ENEMY WENT DOWN WITH A BULLET IN THE RIGHT SIDE.] The difference between the two men may be seen from what followed. After his adversary had been carried home, the Governor-General sent him a friendly message offering to visit him and bury the hatchet for good, as was customary in such affairs between gentlemen. Francis, not being a gentleman, refused, and as soon as he was well enough to travel he came home to England to injure by backstairs-intrigue and the most unscrupulous lying and misrepresentation the man who, in the midst of his difficulties and dangers, had proved all too strong for him in the open. To use his own words, “after a service of thirty-five years from its commencement, and almost thirteen of them passed in the charge and exercise of the first nominal office of the government,” Warren Hastings at last laid down his thankless task and came home to render an account of his stewardship before a tribunal which possessed neither adequate knowledge to judge of his actions nor that judicial spirit of calmness and impartiality which could alone have guaranteed him such a trial as English justice accords to the vilest criminal.