ten or twelve years he had been settled in Yarkand as a trader —a true pioneer of commerce—and for the last two he had been the companion of Mr. Carey, of the India Civil Service, in one of the most adventurous and daring journeys that has ever been made in Central Asia—a journey right round Chinese Turkestan and into the very heart of Tibet. He was now in India, preparing to return to Yarkand, but he was fated never to reach that place again. On his way there, near the summit of the Karakoram Pass, he was treacherously murdered by an Afghan, and so ended the career of one who had done much for our good name in this distant land. Every one who mentioned his name spoke of him with kindliness and respect. It was hard to drive a bargain with him, the traders said, as it is with every other Scotchman, but they appreciated this sign of business capacity, and they liked his openness and fairness and truthfulness. Whenever he could, he was ready to help them ; he regularly threw in his lot with them, and lived amongst them in every way as one of themselves. In this manner he secured their affection to an extraordinary degree—to such an extent, in fact, that the Russian consul at Kashgar afterwards told me that when one of his servants, after his murder, came to him, the man could not restrain himself from crying, evidently from unaffected grief ; and M. Petrovsky said he could never have believed that an Asiatic could become so devoted to a European. These are the men, quite unremarkable though they appear when met with in ordinary life, who are the true missionaries of all that is best in our civilization. Their real greatness is only apparent when they are separated from us by the distance of death—like a picture, coarse and rough when viewed too closely, but instinct with depth of feeling when viewed from a distance. It is they who, going ahead, pave the way for others to follow ; and every Englishman and every European who visits Yarkand territory after Dalgleish, must owe a debt.
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