atches had just before
been frozen to death. The Russians, inured to the climate, had never
been able to take Khiva in the winter months. They had tried once, and
had lost six hundred camels and two-thirds of their men before they saw
the enemy. But Fred Burnaby gaily went forth, clothed-on with
sheepskins. After several days' hard riding and some nights' sleep on
the snow, he arrived in Khiva, chatted with the Khan, fraternised with
the Russian officers, kept his eyes wide open, and finally was invited
to return by a telegram from the Commander-in-Chief, who had been
brought to understand how this strange visitor from the Cavalry Barracks
at Windsor had fluttered the military authorities at St. Petersburg.

This adventure might have sufficed an ordinary man for a lifetime. But
in the very next year, whilst his _Ride to Khiva_ remained the most
popular book in the libraries, he paid a second visit to the Turcomans,
seeking them now, not on the bleak steppes round Khiva, but in the more
fertile, though by Europeans untrodden, plains of Asia Minor. He had one
other cherished project of which he often spoke to me. It was to visit
Timbuctoo. But whilst brooding over this new journey he fell in love,
married, settled down to domestic life in Cromwell Gardens, and took to
politics. It was characteristic of him that, looking about for a seat to
fight, he fixed upon John Bright's at Birmingham, that being at the time
the Gibraltar of political fortresses.

The last time I saw Fred Burnaby was in September 1884. He was standing
on his doorstep at Somerby Hall, Leicestershire, speeding his parting
guests. By his side, holding on with all the might of a chubby hand
to an extended forefinger, was his little son, a child some five years
old, whose chief delight it was thus to hang on to his gigantic father
and toddle about the grounds. We had been staying a week with Burnaby
in his father's old home, and it had been settled, on the invitation
of his old friend Henry Doetsch, that we should meet again later in
the year, and set out for Spain to spend a month at Huelva. A few
weeks later the trumpet sounded from the Soudan, and like an old
war-horse that joyously scents the battle from afar, Burnaby gave up
all his engagements, and fared forth for the Nile.

At first he was engaged in superintending the moving of the troops
between Tanjour and Magrakeh. This was hard work admirably done. But
Burnaby was always pining to get to the f