Note 22 — CHAP. VI.

Late in the evening, the order came to prepare for marching. I had then one child, sixteen months old, by one of the most affectionate of women; she was always suspicious I should leave her, if opportunity offered. She was certainly right in her conjectures; and my answers were uniformly evasive to her questions on that score. The battalion was under arms, while I was in my hut, looking at her and the child alternately. Her soul was in her eyes; and surely never a woman looked at a man with more eagerness and anxiety. I fain would have taken her with me, and the child, who was then smiling in my face. I was eager to give them a final embrace; but fearful of the consequences. O my God! what were my sensations then! and even now, after a lapse of more than thirty years! I am still sure a thousand will never obliterate that moment. In the midst of these mutual distractions, I was repeatedly called by my Moorish name, Shum Shu Cawn, to come and fall in. At last, I resolutely tore myself from her and the child without speaking a single word, and I never saw them more. Farewell! thou most affectionate creature! and may the God of mercy and peace preserve thee and thy infant!——[His surviving friends have observed, that Mr. Scurry, on his return to England, repeatedly sent letters to India, in the hope of their reaching his wife; and, in two or three instances, when he found persons of his acquaintance going to those districts in which she probably resided, he has requested them to use every effort to find her out, and bring her to this country. At the same time he was not without his fears, from the early age at which women die in India, that she was no more. Still he had always sanguine hopes of finding the child, whom he left smiling in its mother’s arms; but in this his expectations were never realized.]