ZEUEIIK. LYING LIKE TRUTH. 69 but he does not, as I understand it, specifically deny what General Gordon alleges — that his son killed these 200 men. Is that correct, Zebehr?

ZebeJir. I do not by any means deny it. I deny my responsibility for my son's conduct.

Sir E. Baring. Then Zebehr does not deny the action of his son, but only his own responsibility for his son's action. I do not think that we need discuss these two points any further.

This in effect ended the conference; but at a later date, and when Gordon was asking that Zebehr might be sent to join him at Khartum and to aid him in putting an end to the insurrection and establishing a settled government in the Soudan, a request with which the government believed that they could not safely or reasonably comply, the subject came up again.

It must not be supposed that Gordon afterwards had any doubt either that the letter which had been found on Zebehr's son had proved that " the black pasha" really instigated the rebellion, or that the letter itself, of which he had a number of copies, had been before the khedive and the court which tried Zebehr, but he may have doubted whether it was regarded as of weighty importance.

He may have suspected that it had been treated with comparative indifference or had been destroyed, and with other evidence cancelled, after Zebehr's services in the Russo-Turkish war; and if so, Zebehr would not have scrupled to declare that any such alleged document was a forgery by which Gordon was imposed upon, or that he probably had a hand in concocting it. To such a man as Zebehr there is a boundless tract of lying always open, and he lied with such solemn assurance, and such appearance of placability and sense of injured innocence, that, whatever may have been the case in Egypt, a good many people in this country began to doubt whether Gordon had not made a mistake, and were ready at anyrate to give half credence to the pasha whom Gordon himself was so anxious to receive as a colleague and as a successor. It may have been that this professed readiness on the part of Zebehr to abandon the feeling which he had entertained on condition that his property in the Soudan was restored to him, and to be ready and willing to vo to assist Gordon, for whom he found compliments