ront. In a private letter
dated Christmas Eve, 1884, he writes: "I do not expect the last boat
will pass this cataract before the middle of next month, and then I
hope to be sent for to the front. It is a responsible post Lord
Wolseley has given me here, with forty miles of the most difficult
part of the river, and I am very grateful to him for letting me have
it. But I must say I shall be better pleased if he sends for me when
the troops advance upon Khartoum."

The order came in due course, and Burnaby was riding on to the relief
of Gordon when his journey was stopped at Abu-Klea. He was attached to
the staff of General Stewart, whose little force of six-thousand-odd
men was suddenly surrounded by a body of fanatical Arabs, nine
thousand strong. The British troops formed square, inside which the
mounted officers sat directing the desperate defence, that again and
again beat back the angry torrent. After some hours' fighting, a
soldier in the excitement of the moment got outside the line of the
square, and was engaged in a hand-to-hand conflict with a cluster of
Arabs. Burnaby, seeing his peril, dashed out to the rescue--"with a
smile on his face," as one who saw him tells me,--and was making
irresistible way against the odds when an Arab thrust a spear in his
throat, and he fell off his horse dead. He sleeps now, as he always
yearned to rest, in a soldier's grave, dug for him by chance on the
continent whose innermost recesses he had planned some day to explore.

The date of his death was January 17th, 1885. His grave is nameless,
and its place in the lonely Desert no man knoweth.

"Brave Burnaby down! Wheresoever 'tis spoken
The news leaves the lips with a wistful regret
We picture that square in the desert, shocked, broken,
Yet packed with stout hearts, and impregnable yet
And there fell, at last, in close _melee_, the fighter
Who Death had so often affronted before;
One deemed he'd no dart for his valorous slighter
Who such a gay heart to the battle-front bore.
But alas! for the spear thrust that ended a story
Romantic as Roland's, as Lion-Heart's brief
Yet crowded with incident, gilded with glory
And crowned by a laurel that's verdant of leaf.
A latter-day Paladin, prone to adventure,
With little enough of the spirit that sways
The man of the market, the shop, the indenture!
Yet grief-drops will glitter on Burnaby's bays.
Fast friend as keen fighter, the strife glow preferr