The clouds gathered thicker and darker around him. After a cold winter at Dalhousie Castle, he writes despondently to Dr. Grant early in 1857, 'I am weak, incapable of exertion or resolution, tormented with the numbness of my nose and throat, without any appetite — and done.' He thinks of seeking a warmer climate. 'Susan (in whom I place more medical confidence than in anybody since you left me) and I have discussed the subject... She and Edith decidedly incline to Malta... I believe they are right, and I think we shall end in passing the winter there.'
The terrible news of the Mutiny found the Marquess of Dalhousie too prostrate to take any part in the parliamentary discussions which followed. 'You can well imagine,' he writes to Dr. Grant in India, in July 1857, 'with what deep grief I have heard the tidings which the last mail has brought. In a public and private sense all is bitter... I can think of nothing else but this outbreak; and though no alarmist, as you well know, I await with the keenest anxiety the tidings which next mail and successive mails shall bring us. From this side I can tell you nothing but what the journals will tell you better, for I am still closely secluded... I am very sad, my dear Grant, at the state of things on your side.'
To the misery of physical prostration, and the bitterness of being unable to aid by his counsel
