These excursions of a leisure hour sent Sir George fresh, vigorous, full of resource to the alarums that arraigned him in South Africa. The greatest of them was not South African, but blew across the Indian Ocean. On an August morning, a steamer drew wearily into Table Bay with a message for the Governor. It was an express from Lord Elphinstone at Bombay, red-bordered, in that it told of the tremendous affair now calmly fixed in history as the Indian Mutiny. Here was an earnest cry, 'Come over and help us,' addressed to the potent British satrap nearest in the Seven Seas. 'Yes,' Sir George mentioned, 'the despatch was in no wise positive as to the outlook in India. Trouble there had been and would be; that was certain. But was India merely face to face with a disturbance which she could manage herself, or was it a widespread mutiny? I was really left to form my own view upon the situation, and I decided that things were very serious. Apparently, religious motives were at the bottom of the affair, and I could fancy how fanaticism, bred thereon, might sweep India. My responsibilities in South Africa were great, for the mad Kaffir movement had hardly been stayed; nay, my whole surroundings were as a thicket of thorns, in their possible complications. But India, which might be lost to us, outweighed everything else, and I felt it my duty to contribute assistance to the utmost limit of my resources.' He would ship troops, guns, munitions, specie, everything South Africa could give, off to India. While he was doing it, a more splendid thing happened--his masterful laying hands upon the troop-ships passing the Cape for China, and his sending of them to India instead. 'I have;' he recorded the act at the time, 'directed that all vessels arriving here with troops for China, shall proceed direct to Calcutta instead of to Singapore.' They are laconic words, but their place is over the front door of the British Empire. To it they brought a service, not ordinary in its annals, as they marked a man willing to put all to the touch. A nation and a personality are in the incident, and, remembering that, let us trace it out. At this date we had a variance with China, and were undertaking warlike operations in that country, jointly with France. Troops from England were hurrying to Lord Elgin, who was seeing our affairs through in China. Some of the transports reached Cape Town, a few days after Sir George Grey received the Elphinstone message. They needed water and fresh provisions, and receiving these would have gone on with all haste to China. It was a throbbing moment for a Cape Governor, accustomed to think in the British Empire. What should he do?