terms of the agreement if by any chance he could escape from them. On both sides there were dallyings and delays. At last Akbar Khan made a new and startling proposition to our envoy. It was that they two should enter into a secret treaty, should unite their arms against the other chiefs, and should keep Shah Sujah on the throne as nominal king, with Akbar Khan as his vizier. Macnaghten caught at the proposals. He had entered into terms of negotiation with the Afghan chiefs together; he now consented to enter into a secret treaty with one of the chiefs to turn their joint arms against the others. It would be idle and shameful to attempt to defend such a policy. We can only excuse it by considering the terrible circumstances of Macnaghten's position, the manner in which his nerves and moral fiber had been shaken and shattered by calamities, and his doubts whether he could place any reliance on the promises of the chiefs. He had apparently sunk into that condition of mind which Macaulay tells us that Clive adopted so readily in his dealings with Asiatics, and under the influence of which men naturally honorable and high-minded come to believe that it is right to act treacherously with those whom we believe to be treacherous. All this is but excuse, and rather poor excuse. When it has all been said and thought of, we must still be glad to believe that there are not many Englishmen who would, under any circumstances, have consented even to give a hearing to the proposals of Akbar Khan.

Whatever Macnaghten's error, it was dearly expiated. He went out at noon next day to confer with Akbar Khan on the banks of the neighboring river. Three of his officers were with him. Akbar Khan was ominously surrounded by friends and retainers. These kept pressing round the unfortunate envoy. Some remonstrance was made by one of the English officers, but Akbar Khan said it was of no consequence, as they were all in the secret. Not many words were spoken; the expected conference had hardly begun when a signal was given or an order issued by Akbar Khan, and the envoy and the officers were suddenly seized from behind. A scene of wild confusion followed, in which hardly anything is clear and certain but the one most horrible incident. The envoy struggled with Akbar Khan, who had himself seized Macnaghten; Akbar Khan drew from his belt one of a pair of pistols which Macnaghten had presented to him a short time before, and shot him through the body. The fanatics who were crowding

round hacked the body to pieces with their knives. Of the three officers one was killed on the spot; the other two were forced to mount Afghan horses and carried away as pris

oners.

At first this horrid deed of treachery and blood shows like that to which Clearchus and his companions, the chiefs of the famous ten thousand Greeks, fell victims at the hands of Tissaphernes, the Persian satrap. But it seems certain that the treachery of Akbar, base as it was, did not contemplate more than the seizure of the envoy and his officers. There were jealousies and disputes among the chiefs of the insurrection. One of them, in especial, had got his mind filled with the conviction, inspired, no doubt, by the unfortunate and unparalleled negotiation already mentioned, that the envoy had offered a price for his head. Akbar Khan was accused by him of being a secret friend of the envoy and the English. Akbar Khan's father was a captive in the hands of the English, and it may have been thought that on his account and for personal purposes Akbar was favoring the envoy, and even intriguing with him. Akbar offered to prove his sincerity by making the envoy a captive and handing him over to the chiefs. This was the treacherous plot which he strove to carry out by entering into the secret negotiations with the easily deluded envoy. On the fatal day the latter resisted and struggled; Akbar Khan heard a cry of alarm that the English soldiers were coming out of the cantonments to rescue the envoy; and, wild with passion, he suddenly drew his pistol and fired. This was the statement made again and again by Akbar Khan himself. It does not seem an improbable explanation for what otherwise looks a murder as stupid and purposeless as it was brutal. The explanation does not much relieve the darkness of Akbar Khan's character. It is given here as history, not as exculpation. There is not the slightest reason to suppose that Akbar Khan would have shrunk from any treachery or any cruelty which served his purpose. His own explanation of his purpose in this instance shows a degree of treachery which could hardly be surpassed even in the East. But it is well to bear in mind that the suspicion of perfidy under which the English envoy labored, and which was the main impulse of Akbar Khan's movement, had evidence enough to support it in the eyes of suspicious enemies, and that poor Macnaghten would not have been murdered had he not consented to meet Akbar Khan and

treat with him on a proposition to which an English official should never have listened.

A terrible agony of suspense followed among the little English force in the cantonments. The military chiefs afterward stated that they did not know until the following day that any calamity had befallen the envoy. But a keen suspicion ran through the cantonments that some fearful deed had been done. No step was taken to avenge the death of Macnaghten, even when it became known that his hacked and mangled body had been exhibited in triumph all through the streets and bazaars of Cabul. A paralysis seemed to have fallen over the councils of our military chiefs. On December 24th, 1841, came a letter from one of the officers seized by Akbar Khan, accompanying proposals for a treaty from the Afghan chiefs. It is hard now to understand how any English officers could have consented to enter into terms with the murderers of Macnaghten before his mangled body could well have ceased to bleed. It is strange that it did not occur to most of them that there was an alternative; that they were not ordered by fate to accept whatever the conquerors chose to offer. We can all see the difficulty of their position. General Elphinstone and his second in command, Brigadier Shelton, were convinced that it would be equally impossible to stay where they were or to cut their way through the Afghans. But it might have occurred to many that they were nevertheless not bound to treat with the Afghans. They might have remembered the famous answer of the father in Corneille's immortal drama, who is asked what his son could have done but yield in the face of such odds, and exclaims in generous passion that he could have died. One English officer of mark did counsel his superiors in this spirit. This was Major Eldred Pottinger, whose skill and courage in the defense of Herat we have already mentioned. Pottinger was for cutting their way through all enemies and difficulties as far as they could, and then occupying the ground with their dead bodies. But his advice was hardly taken into consideration.

It was determined to treat with the Afghans; and treating with the Afghans now meant accepting any terms the Afghans chose to impose on their fallen enemies. In the negotiations that went on, some written documents were exchanged. One of these, drawn up by the English negotiators, contains a short sentence which we believe to be absolutely unique in the

history of British dealings with armed enemies. It is an appeal to the Afghan conquerors not to be too hard upon the vanquished, not to break the bruised reed. "In friendship, kindness and consideration are necessary, not overpowering the weak with sufferings!"

In friendship!- we appealed to the friendship of Macnaghten's murderers; to the friendship, in any case, of the man whose father we had dethroned and driven into exile. Not overpowering the weak with sufferings! The weak were the English! One might fancy he was reading the plaintive and piteous appeal of some forlorn and feeble tribe of helpless half-breeds for the mercy of arrogant and mastering rulers. "Suffolk's imperious tongue is stern and rough," says one in Shakespeare's pages, when he is bidden to ask for consideration at the hands of captors whom he is no longer able to resist. The tongue with which the English force at Cabul addressed the Afghans was not imperious or stern or rough. It was bated, mild, and plaintive. Only the other day, it would seem, these men had blown up the gates of Ghuznee, and rushed through the dense smoke and the falling ruins to attack the enemy hand to hand. Only the other day our envoy had received in surrender the bright sword of Dost Mahomed. Now the same men who had seen these things could only plead for a little gentleness of consideration, and had no thought of resistance, and did not any longer seem to know how to die.

We accepted the terms of treaty offered to us. Nothing else could be done by men who were not prepared to adopt the advice of the heroic father in Corneille. The English were at once to take themselves off out of Afghanistan, giving up all their guns except six, which they were allowed to retain for their necessary defense in their mournful journey home; they were to leave behind all the treasure, and to guarantee the payment of something additional for the safe-conduct of the poor little army to Peshawur or to Jellalabad; and they were to hand over six officers as hostages for the due fulfillment of the conditions. It is of course understood that the conditions included the immediate release of Dost Mahomed and his family and their return to Afghanistan. When these should return, the six hostages were to be released. Only one concession had been obtained from the conquerors. It was at first demanded that some of the married ladies should be left as hostages; but on the urgent representations of the English officers this con

dition was waived

at least for the moment. When the treaty was signed, the officers who had been seized when Macnaghten was murdered were released.

It is worth mentioning that these officers were not badly treated by Akbar Khan while they were in his power. On the contrary, he had to make strenuous efforts, and did make them in good faith, to save them from being murdered by bands of his fanatical followers. One of the officers has himself described the almost desperate efforts which Akbar Khan had to make to save him from the fury of the mob, who thronged thirsting for the blood of the Englishman up to the very stirrup of their young chief. "Akbar Khan," says this officer, "at length drew his sword and laid about him right manfully" in defense of his prisoner. When, however, he had got the latter into a place of safety, the impetuous young Afghan chief could not restrain a sneer at his captive and the cause his captive represented. Turning to the English officer, he said more than once, "in a tone of triumphant derision," some words such as these: "So you are the man who came here to seize my country?"

It must be owned that the condition of things gave bitter meaning to the taunt, if it did not actually excuse it. At a later period of this melancholy story it is told by Lady Sale that crowds of the fanatical Ghilzyes were endeavoring to persuade Akbar Khan to slaughter all the English, and that when he tried to pacify them they said that when Burnes came into the country they entreated Akbar Khan's father to have Burnes killed, or he would go back to Hindostan, and on some future day return and bring an army with him, "to take our country from us"; and all the calamities had come upon them because Dost Mahomed would not take their advice. Akbar Khan either was or pretended to be moderate. He might, indeed, safely put on an air of magnanimity. His enemies were doomed. It needed no command from him to decree their destruction.

The withdrawal from Cabul began. It was the heart of a cruel winter. The English had to make their way through the awful pass of Kurd Cabul. This stupendous gorge runs for some five miles between mountain ranges so narrow, lofty, and grim that in the winter season the rays of the sun can hardly pierce its darkness even at the noontide. Down the center dashed a precipitous mountain torrent so fiercely that