“He was, when we entered, surrounded by his generals playing vingt-un for handfuls of gazees (dollars); he showed his character here too, always ready to back his own play, and was loud in his expressions of delight when successful. He apologized for being found so employed, but said, they had nothing else to do there, but that when at Cairo they had their farms to attend to and plenty of business to occupy their time.” The second day after the departure of Colonel Alderson, that good and gallant officer General Michell fell a sacrifice to the climate and the fatigue he suffered on the Gaza expedition, and Colonel Bridgeman succeeded to the command. Colonel Alderson remarks, “The cold caught by General Michell, that wretched night of incessant rain, that followed the affair of Medjdel, under single canvass, acting on a delicate frame, arising from repeated wounds received in an hundred fights, together with, I firmly believe, the mortification he felt at the result of the movement on Gaza, brought on a fever, under which poor Michell sank in a few days. He died at Jaffa on the 24th of January, at noon. “It falls to the lot of few soldiers to earn so high a reputation in the profession as Brigadier-General Michell had done; fewer still, who to these high military acquirements have united a mind so highly cultivated. He was too well known in the military world to enable me to add anything to his well-earned reputation. I may, however, be permitted, as a friend, to say that, having been his constant companion since we left Spain together, I deeply felt and deplored his loss; and that a life so valuable to his country should have been _thus_ so prematurely cut off. “His remains were deposited in a vault hastily constructed by the British sappers, in what is called the English, or South-Eastern Bastion, at Jaffa, for which a marble slab is now preparing at Malta, as a slight memorial of the great respect and esteem in which he was held by his brother officers.” Footnote 53: See _Levant Papers_, Part III., pp. 203, 268. Footnote 54: Letter to the Seraskier and Hussein Pacha, dated January 21, 1841. _Levant Papers_, Part III., pp. 275, 276. Footnote 55: _Memorandum for Colonel Alderson’s guidance._ Jaffa, January 22, 1841.