Not then, not for another year and more, was the departure to be.  ’Put my watch under my pillow,’ he looked up cheerily to those at his bedside; ’and thank you for taking care of it while I have been ill.  It’s the watch the Queen gave me, and I like to have it near.’  But that illness sapped and mined him, even while he proposed, ’Oh, yes, we’ll go down to Chelsea and inspect Carlyle’s old house.  I’ll try and fill it again with him, in particular the room at the top which he built to be noise-proof, and which wasn’t.’  The visit was never paid, but the celebration of the Queen’s reign of sixty years still found Sir George able to be about.

That was right well, for how many had made such a contribution to the history and dominion of the reign?  Truly, dreams had come about, since he listened to the bells of Plymouth, when taking passage by the “Beagle.”  Here was goodly proof of things achieved for the happiness of men, such as even he had scarce dared to imagine.  The fairies had been working.

Sir George followed, in imagination, the nations of the realm as they walked through London, its capital, while all the world .wondered.  He attended, in heart, the simple service at St. Paul’s Cathedral, where he himself was to find a last resting-place, sleeping with the worthies.  He could picture the great fleet, seal of the sea-power which made all possible, spread itself athwart the Solent.  Yes Sir George Grey heard, from afar, the ‘tumult and the shouting,’ and they rounded off his own career as the True Briton and True Imperialist.

He heard also, amid the glorious rumble, of another royal progress made by the Queen.  It was at her Highland home, the spectators the eternal hills which lie about it.  For caparisoning there was a donkey-chaise, and for escort a Highlander, carrying the shawls.  The Queen was bound for the manse, across the fields by the river-side, to pray with the minister’s wife that he, being ill, might be made whole.

That was the royal progress Sir George Grey would best have liked to see, because it held the key to the other.  From it, he sent, by his friend the Prime Minister of New Zealand, a last message to Greater Britain.  ’Give the people of New Zealand my love,’ it ran, ’and may God have you in His keeping?  It was the closing of the book, save for the blank pages which occur at the end.

‘It’s all light,’ was Selwyn’s dying exclamation in Maori.  None knew the Maori words that Sir George Grey murmured, and none doubted what they were.  To us, the island race of two worlds,

     Under the Cross of Gold,
     That shines over city and river,
     There he shall rest for ever,
     Among the wise and the bold.

THE END