There was a hill, with a wide outlook of plain, and from it, the lesser wild animals at feed, might be marked for the gloaming.  It was covert wherein the lion could abide, to lie in wait, a secret lurking-place.  Up the back of this hill climbed Sir George, eye and ear on the alert, for one suspected to be about.  He was about, but already bounding down the rocky face of the ridge, in a hurry to be clear of the hunter.  Sir George mounted his horse, eager to cut him off, and rode, break-neck, the path he had already climbed.  There the lion galloped, at a kingly swing, heading for the thick bush in the distance.  As he neared it, Sir George aimed a forlorn shot, which proved a farewell salute.  He dismounted, and waded through the growth, to the concern of his Kaffir boy, but the lion was tracked no more.

These excursions of a leisure hour sent Sir George fresh, vigorous, full of resource to the alarums that arraigned him in South Africa.  The greatest of them was not South African, but blew across the Indian Ocean.  On an August morning, a steamer drew wearily into Table Bay with a message for the Governor.  It was an express from Lord Elphinstone at Bombay, red-bordered, in that it told of the tremendous affair now calmly fixed in history as the Indian Mutiny.  Here was an earnest cry, ’Come over and help us,’ addressed to the potent British satrap nearest in the Seven Seas.

‘Yes,’ Sir George mentioned, ’the despatch was in no wise positive as to the outlook in India.  Trouble there had been and would be; that was certain.  But was India merely face to face with a disturbance which she could manage herself, or was it a widespread mutiny?  I was really left to form my own view upon the situation, and I decided that things were very serious.  Apparently, religious motives were at the bottom of the affair, and I could fancy how fanaticism, bred thereon, might sweep India.  My responsibilities in South Africa were great, for the mad Kaffir movement had hardly been stayed; nay, my whole surroundings were as a thicket of thorns, in their possible complications.  But India, which might be lost to us, outweighed everything else, and I felt it my duty to contribute assistance to the utmost limit of my resources.’

He would ship troops, guns, munitions, specie, everything South Africa could give, off to India.  While he was doing it, a more splendid thing happened—­his masterful laying hands upon the troop-ships passing the Cape for China, and his sending of them to India instead.  ‘I have;’ he recorded the act at the time, ’directed that all vessels arriving here with troops for China, shall proceed direct to Calcutta instead of to Singapore.’  They are laconic words, but their place is over the front door of the British Empire.  To it they brought a service, not ordinary in its annals, as they marked a man willing to put all to the touch.  A nation and a personality are in the incident, and, remembering that, let us trace it out.