'Now the first thing is to provide you with clothes. I am expecting
Colonel Stewart here, every minute, and he will see that you are made
comfortable.'

"'I shall be glad to place myself at your disposal, sir,' I said. 'I
speak Arabic fluently, and shall be ready to perform any service of
which I may be capable.'

"'I thank you,' he said, 'and will avail myself of your offer, if I see
any occasion; but at present, we have rather to suffer than to do. We
have occasional fights, but of late the attacks have been feeble, and I
think that the Mahdi depends upon hunger rather than force to obtain
possession of this town.

"This evening, I will ask you to tell me your story. Colonel Stewart
will show you a room. There is only one other white man--Mr.
Power--here. We live together as one family, of which you will now be a
member.'

"I felt strange when I came to put on my European clothes. Mr. Power,
who tells me he has been here for some years, as correspondent of the
Times, has this afternoon taken me round the defences, and into the
workshops. I think the place can resist any attacks, if the troops
remain faithful; but of this there is a doubt. A good many of the
Soudanese have already been sent away. As Gordon said at dinner this
evening, if he had but a score of English officers, he would be
perfectly confident that he could resist any enemy save starvation.

"September 12th:

"It has been settled that Colonel Stewart and Mr. Power are to go down
the river in the Abbas, and I am to go with them. The General proposed
it to me. I said that I could not think of leaving him here by himself,
so he said kindly:

"'I thank you, Mr. Hilliard, but you could do no good here, and would
only be throwing away your life. We can hold on to the end of the year,
though the pinch will be very severe; but I think we can make the
stores last, till then. But by the end of December our last crust will
have been eaten, and the end will have come. It will be a satisfaction
to me to know that I have done my best, and fail only because of the
miserable delays and hesitation of government.'

"So it is settled that I am going. The gunboats are to escort us for
some distance. Were it not for Gordon, I should feel delighted at the
prospect. It is horrible to leave him--one of the noblest
Englishmen!--alone to his fate. My only consolation is that if I
remained I could not avert it, but should only be a sharer in it.

"September 18th:

"W