The Lamentable Burial Took Place In The Evening As The Shadows Fell.
This Sums Up The Story - A Career Of Dissipation, Death At Twenty-One, A
Rough, Oblong Box, No One To Be Sorry.
It made my heart ache for the
mother, who would have given much to be where I was, and
See "the
dreary death train" move slowly to the dreary inclosure on a hill-top,
where the grass grows rank and very green round a number of white
wooden crosses, which mark the graves of the officers and soldiers who
fell in 1876. The Union Jack was thrown over the coffin, which was
carried by six Sikhs, and Mr. Low, Major Swinburne, Rajah Dris and some
followers, and Sultan Abdullah's two boys, who had nothing better to
do, followed it. By the time the grave was reached torches were
required, and the burial service was read from my prayer-book. It was
all sad and saddening.
The weather is still glorious, the winding Perak still mirrors in
scarcely rippled blue the intensely blue sky, "never wind blows
loudly," but soft airs rustle the trees. One could not lead a more
tropical life than this, with apes and elephants about one under the
cocoa-palms, and with the mercury ranging from 80 degrees to 90
degrees! Gorgeous, indeed, are the birds and butterflies and flowers;
but often when the erythrina and the Poinciana regia are strewing the
ground with their flaming blossoms, I think with a passionate longing
of the fragile Trientalis Europae, of crimson-tipped lichens, of faint
odors of half-hidden primroses, of whiffs of honey and heather from
purple moorlands, and of all the homely, fragrant, unobtrusive flowers
that are linked with you!
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