Yule had wrought from sheer love of the work and without expectation of public recognition, and it was therefore a great surprise as well as gratification to him, to find that the demand for his Marco Polo was such as to justify the appearance of a second edition only a few years after the first.  The preparation of this enlarged edition, with much other miscellaneous work (see subjoined bibliography), and the superintendence of the building of the church already named, kept him fully occupied for the next three years.

Amongst the parerga and miscellaneous occupations of Yule’s leisure hours in the period 1869-74, may be mentioned an interesting correspondence with Professor W. W. Skeat on the subject of William of Palerne and Sicilian examples of the Werwolf; the skilful analysis and exposure of Klaproth’s false geography;[64] the purchase and despatch of Sicilian seeds and young trees for use in the Punjab, at the request of the Indian Forestry Department; translations (prepared for friends) of tracts on the cultivation of Sumach and the collection of Manna as practised in Sicily; also a number of small services rendered to the South Kensington Museum, at the request of the late Sir Henry Cole.  These latter included obtaining Italian and Sicilian bibliographic contributions to the Science and Art Department’s Catalogue of Books on Art, selecting architectural subjects to be photographed;[65] negotiating the purchase of the original drawings illustrative of Padre B. Gravina’s great work on the Cathedral of Monreale; and superintending the execution of a copy in mosaic of the large mosaic picture (in the Norman Palatine Chapel, Palermo,) of the Entry of our Lord into Jerusalem.

In the spring of 1875, just after the publication of the second edition of Marco Polo, Yule had to mourn the loss of his noble wife.  He was absent from Sicily at the time, but returned a few hours after her death on 30th April.  She had suffered for many years from a severe form of heart disease, but her end was perfect peace.  She was laid to rest, amid touching tokens of both public and private sympathy, in the beautiful camposanto on Monte Pellegrino.  What her loss was to Yule only his oldest and closest friends were in a position to realise.  Long years of suffering had impaired neither the soundness of her judgment nor the sweetness, and even gaiety, of her happy, unselfish disposition.  And in spirit, as even in appearance, she retained to the very last much of the radiance of her youth.  Nor were her intellectual gifts less remarkable.  Few who had once conversed with her ever forgot her, and certainly no one who had once known her intimately ever ceased to love her.[66]

Shortly after this calamity, Yule removed to London, and on the retirement of his old friend, Sir William Baker, from the India Council early that autumn, Lord Salisbury at once selected him for the vacant seat.  Nothing would ever have made him a party-man, but he always followed Lord Salisbury with conviction, and worked under him with steady confidence.