Odoric of Pordenone,
  Ibn Batuta, Marignolli,
  Benedict de Goes—­’Seeking
  Lost Cathay and finding Heaven.’ 
  Many more whose lives he cherished
  With the piety of learning;
  Fading records, buried pages,
  Failing lights and fires forgotten,
  By his energy recovered,
  By his eloquence re-kindled. 
  ‘Moriturus vos saluto’
  Breathes his last the dying scholar,
  And the far off ages answer: 
  Immortales te salutant.  D. M.”

The same idea had been previously embodied, in very felicitous language, by the late General Sir William Lockhart, in a letter which that noble soldier addressed to the present writer a few days after Yule’s death.  And Yule himself would have taken pleasure in the idea of those meetings with his old travellers, which seemed so certain to his surviving friends.[78]

He rests in the old cemetery at Tunbridge Wells, with his second wife, as he had directed.  A great gathering of friends attended the first part of the burial service which was held in London on 3rd January, 1890.  Amongst those present were witnesses of every stage of his career, from his boyish days at the High School of Edinburgh downwards.  His daughter, of course, was there, led by the faithful, peerless friend who was so soon to follow him into the Undiscovered Country.[79] She and his youngest nephew, with two cousins and a few old friends, followed his remains over the snow to the graveside.  The epitaph subsequently inscribed on the tomb was penned by Yule himself, but is by no means representative of his powers in a kind of composition in which he had so often excelled in the service of others.  As a composer of epitaphs and other monumental inscriptions few of our time have surpassed, if any have equalled him, in his best efforts.

SIR GEORGE UDNY YULE, C.B., K.C.S.I.[80]

George Udny Yule, born at Inveresk in 1813, passed through Haileybury into the Bengal Civil Service, which he entered at the age of 18 years.  For twenty-five years his work lay in Eastern Bengal.  He gradually became known to the Government for his activity and good sense, but won a far wider reputation as a mighty hunter, alike with hog-spear and double barrel.  By 1856 the roll of his slain tigers exceeded four hundred, some of them of special fame; after that he continued slaying his tigers, but ceased to count them.  For some years he and a few friends used annually to visit the plains of the Brahmaputra, near the Garrow Hills—­an entirely virgin country then, and swarming with large game.  Yule used to describe his once seeing seven rhinoceroses at once on the great plain, besides herds of wild buffalo and deer of several kinds.  One of the party started the theory that Noah’s Ark had been shipwrecked there!  In those days George Yule was the only man to whom the Maharajah of Nepaul, Sir Jung Bahadur, conceded leave to shoot within his frontier.