All this January and part of February Richard was ill, and I began to implore him to throw up the Service, and to live where best suited him, even in a small way, as of course we should have been very, very poor, and at any rate, I said, "One winter _may_ be an accident, but two winters is a caution; and you must never winter here again." He said, "No; I quite agree with you there; we will never winter here again; but I won't throw up the Service until I either get Marocco, or they let me retire on full pension." And I then said, "When we go home that is what we will try for, that you may retire _now_ on full pension, which will only be six years before your time." On the 17th of January he mourns Colonel Burnaby's death. He was delighted in February with reading a German author, who began his book thus: "Der Geruch der rosen verpestet die Lüft und die verdammten Nachtigallen heulen die ganze Nacht." We were now writing the index of the "Arabian Nights," I at dictation. On Thursday, the 12th, I said to him, "Now mind, to-morrow is _Friday, the 13th_; it is our unlucky day, and we have got to be very careful." [Sidenote: _Gordon's Death_.] But when Friday, the 13th, came, we heard of poor Gordon's death, which had taken place Monday, January the 26th, and they had been keeping it from us. We both collapsed altogether, were ill all day, and profoundly melancholy. I remembered, too, that at the time that Gordon had been sent out, it was a toss up whether Richard or Gordon should go. Richard had just begun to break up (he was fifty-five), and I knew that if he was sent he would get up out of his sick bed to go, and think himself perfectly capable of undertaking the expedition; and I remember writing privately to the Foreign Office, to let them know how ill he was. Richard at that time expressed a hope that they would not send Gordon without five hundred soldiers to back him, and the neglect of this, whether from economy, or whether Gordon refused it, was the sole cause of the failure. Richard could talk of nothing else, and he fretted a great deal about it. In one of the illustrated papers there was a picture of Gordon lying deserted in the desert, his Bible in one hand, his revolver in the other, and the vultures sitting around. When Richard saw it he said with great emotion, "Take it away! I can't bear to look at it. I have had to feel that myself; I know what it is." But the more the news came in, the less he believed in Gordon's death, and he died believing that Gordon (disgusted at the cruel treatment of being abandoned to his fate) had escaped by the missing boat, and would come out Congo-wards, but that he would never let himself be rediscovered, nor reappear in England--and Gordon was quite the man to do it. I quote this prematurely, because it concerns the present subject:-- "IS GORDON DEAD? "Trieste, April 29, 1887.