In a second twelve men were on the assassin; an English officer was pulling them off, and with his sword-hilt keeping back the Native guards, who would have killed the assailant on the spot. The torches had gone out; but the Viceroy, who had staggered over the pier side, was dimly seen rising up in the knee-deep water, and clearing the hair off his brow with his hand as if recovering himself. His Private Secretary was instantly at his side in the surf, helping him up the bank. 'Burne,' he said quietly, 'they've hit me.' Then, in a louder voice, which was {196} heard on the pier, 'It's all right, I don't think I'm much hurt,' or words to that effect. In another minute he was sitting under the smoky glare of the re-lit torches, on a rude native cart at the side of the jetty, his legs hanging loosely down. Then they lifted him bodily on to the cart, and saw a great dark patch on the back of his light coat. The blood came streaming out, and men tried to stanch it with their handkerchiefs. For a moment or two he sat up on the cart, then he fell heavily backwards. 'Lift up my head,' he said faintly: and said no more. They carried him down into the steam launch, some silently believing him dead. Others, angry with themselves for the bare surmise, cut open his coat and vest, and stopped the wound with hastily torn strips of cloth and the palms of their hands. Others kept rubbing his feet and legs. Three supported his head. The assassin lay tied and stunned a few yards from him. As the launch shot on in the darkness, eight bells rang across the water from the ships. When it came near the frigate, where the guests were waiting for dinner, and jesting about some fish which they had caught for the meal, the lights in the launch were suddenly put out, to hide what was going on in it. They lifted Lord Mayo gently to his cabin: when they laid him down in his cot, every one saw that he was dead. To all on board, that night stands out from among all other nights in their lives. A silence, which seemed as if it would never again be broken, {197} suddenly fell on the holiday ship with its 600 souls. The doctors held their interview with the dead--two stabs from the same knife on the shoulder had penetrated the cavity of the chest, either of them sufficient to cause death. On the guest steamer there were hysterics and weeping; but in the ship where the Viceroy lay, the grief was too deep for outward expression. Men moved about solitarily through the night, each saying bitterly to his own heart, 'Would that it had been one of us.' The anguish of her who received back her dead was not, and is not, for words.