THE LIFE OF

On the 24th of October, 1872, Richard left England for Trieste, to pass, though we little thought it then, the last eighteen years of his life. He was recommended to go to Trieste by sea, which always did him so much good. He was to go on and look for a house, hire servants, etc.; and I was to lay in the usual stock of everything a Consul could want, and follow as soon as might be by land. We all went down to Southampton to see him off, but, as the gale and fog were awful, they were only able to steam out and anchor in the Yarmouth Roads.[1]

On the 18th of November I went down to Folkestone to cross, en route to Trieste, and ran through straight to Brussels, where I slept, and next day got to Cologne.

Of course, I stopped and looked at the Cathedral, and went to Johann M. Farina's (4, Jülichs Platz), and the Museum, top of Cathedral, for view, stained glass, and all that; and then I sauntered on to Bonn, Coblenz, Bingen, Castel, Mayence, until I got to Frankfort. I enjoyed the Rhine very much, but my perception for scenery had been a little blunted by the magnificence of South America, and for antiquities by ancient Syria. I thought the finest things in Frankfort were Dannecker's Ariadne, belonging to Mr. Bethmann, a private collection of pictures; and Huss before the Council of Constance, by Lessing; and another of four priests at the throne of the Virgin, by Moretto; and I thought how pretty the place must be in summer.

From here I went quietly on to Würzburg, and thence to Munich, where I was enchanted with the Hôtel des Quatres Saisons. I enjoyed the winding river, and the Forest of Spessart (the remnant of the great primeval Hercynian Forest described by Cæsar and Tacitus), the Spessart range of hills wooded to the top, the wild country with a few villages. I thought the rail along the river-side ascending amongst the wooded hills, crossing the stream of the Laufach, very beautiful, and the entrance to Würzburg reminded me of Damascus and its minarets. Here I called on the famous Dr. Döllinger. I went to see Steigenwald's Bavarian glass, and the porcelain with the Old Masters painted on it, ascended to the top of the Cathedral tower to see the view, and went to every museum and picture-gallery in the place, and thought, as most people do, I imagine, that the City was very pretty, but the Art was very new.

I then went on quietly to Innsbrück. The scenery is magnificent along the banks of the river Inn, through the Tyrolese mountains, capped with snow, wooded, dotted with villages, and with cattle on the mounds, and churches and chapels with delicate spires. I liked the exhilarating air, and especially the valley of Zillerthal, and seeing the fine Tyrolean peasants. The best thing to see at Innsbrück is the Hof-Kirche, or Court Church. There are statues in bronze of all the great Emperors of Austria, and one or two Empresses; they stand in two lines down the church, all in armour and coats of mail. The moment I went into the centre, between these imperial lines, I singled out one of them, exclaiming, "There is a gentleman and a knight, from the top of his head to the sole of his foot;" and I ran up to see who he was. He was labelled, "King Arthur of England." All that day we were crossing the Brenner Pass. The scenery is splendid, with snowy peaks, wooded mountains, waterfalls, and rivers (the Eisach and Adige), torrents and boulders, porphyry rocks, villages, fortresses, convents and castles, churches and chapels with slender red or green steeples. I arrived at Trent, where I found nothing to stay for; so went on to Verona, Vicenza, Padua, and Venice, and landed at the Hôtel Europa—which I had inhabited long ago, in 1858, when I was a girl,—in time for table d'hôte. It was fourteen years since I had seen Venice, and it was like a dream to come back again. It was all to a hair as I left it, even, I believe, to the artificial flowers on the table d'hôte table. It was just the same, only less gay and brilliant—it had lost the Austrians and Henri V.'s Court; and I was older, and all the friends I knew were dispersed.

We meet by accident in Venice and go to Trieste.

My first action was to send telegram and letter to Trieste (which was only six hours away), to announce my arrival, then the next day to gondola all over Venice, and to visit all old haunts. Towards late afternoon I thought it would be only civil to call on my Consul, Sir William Perry. Lucky that I did so. After greeting me kindly, he said something about "Captain Burton." I said, "Oh, he is at Trieste; I am just going to join him." "No; he has just left me." Seeing that he was rather old, and seemed a little deaf and short-sighted, I thought he did not understand, so I explained for the third time that "I was Mrs. Burton (not Captain Burton), just arrived from London, on my way to join my husband at Trieste." "I know all that," he said, rather impatiently; "you had better come with me in my gondola. I am going to the 'Morocco' now—the ship that will sail for Trieste." I said, "Certainly;" and, very much puzzled, got into the gondola, chatted gaily, and went on board. As soon as I got down into the saloon, lo, and behold, there was my husband, quietly seated at the table, writing. "Hallo!" he said, "what the devil are you doing here?" So I said, "Ditto;" and we sat down and began to explain, Sir William looking intensely amused.

I had thought when Richard left me on the 24th October, that he had sailed straight for Trieste, and he thought I had also started by land straight for Trieste; so we had gone on writing and telegraphing to each other at Trieste, neither of us ever receiving anything, and Mr. Brock, our dear old Vice-Consul, who had been there for about forty years, thought what a funny couple he was going to have to deal with, who kept writing and telegraphing to each other, evidently knowing nothing of each other's movements. Stories never lose anything in the recital, and consequently this one grew thusly: "That the Burtons had been wandering separately all over Europe, amusing themselves, without knowing where each other were; that they had met quite by accident in the Piazza at Venice, shaking hands with each other like a pair of brothers who had met but yesterday, and then walked off to their hotel, sat down to their writing, as if nothing was the matter."

The ship was detained for cargo and enabled us to stay several days in Venice, amusing ourselves, and on the 6th of December, 1872, we crossed over to Trieste in the Cunard s.s. Morocco, Captain Ferguson, steaming out at 8 a.m., and getting to Trieste at 5.15 p.m. There came on board Mr. Brock, our Vice-Consul, and Mr. O'Callaghan, our Consular Chaplain. It was remarked "that Captain and Mrs. Burton (the new Consul) took up their quarters at the Hôtel de la Ville, he walking along with his game-cock under his arm, and she with her bull-terrier," and it was thought that we must be very funny. We dined at table d'hôte, and we did not like the place at all.

When Richard left England I had entrusted him with the care of two boxes containing all my best clothes, and part of my jewellery, wherewith to open my Trieste campaign. He contrived to lose them on the road (value about £130), so when I arrived I had nothing to wear. We wrote and complained, but the Peninsular and Oriental would give us no redress; and when the boxes did arrive they were empty, but had been so cleverly robbed that we had to get the canvas covers off, before we perceived that they had been opened by running the pin out of the hinges at the back. I never recovered anything. The Peninsular laid the blame on Lloyd's, and Lloyd's on the Peninsular, and Richard said, "Of course I believe them both."

We stayed for the first six months in the hotel. The chief Israelitish family, our local Rothschilds, Chief Banker, and afterwards Director of Austrian-Lloyd's, Baron Morpurgo, called upon us, and opened their house to us; and this introduced us to all that was the best of Trieste, and everybody called. This family have always deserved to be placed on a pedestal for their princely hospitality, their enormous charities, and their innate nobleness of nature. They made Trieste what it was, and every one was glad to be asked to their house. We made our debut at the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Sassoon. She was the belle of our little society; he was a British subject; and Richard, being his Consul, had to be sort of "best man." It was very interesting. I had not got used at that time to telegraphs, and when I saw innumerable telegrams flying about at the breakfast, I innocently asked if there was any great political crisis. They laughed, and they said, "Oh no; we only telegraphed to Madame Froufrou, to tell her how much Louise's dress was admired, and she telegraphs back her pleasure at hearing it," and so forth. I think in those days telegrams caused more surprise in England than they did abroad. I shall never forget the rage of my family the first time I came home from Trieste, who were thrown into violent palpitations at a telegram from me, which was only to ask them to send me a big goose for Michaelmas.

Richard as a "Celebrity at Home."

As I said, we stayed the first six months at the hotel, and we disliked the place very much, until we got thoroughly used to it; and, when we got used to it, I cannot give a better description of our lives than to cut out from the World the "Celebrity at Home, Captain R. F. Burton at Trieste," 1877, with Alfred Bates Richards's comments on the same; and that was the life we led from 1872 to 1882-83.

"CAPTAIN RICHARD F. BURTON AT TRIESTE.

"It is not given to every man to go to Trieste. The fact need not cause universal regret, inasmuch as the chief Austrian port on the Adriatic shares with Oriental towns the disagreeable character of presenting a fair appearance from a distance, and afflicting the traveller who has become for the time a denizen, with a painful sense of disenchantment. Perhaps the first glimpse of Trieste owes something to contrast, as it is obtained after passing through a desolate stony wilderness called the Karso. As the train glides from these inhospitable heights towards Trieste, the head of the Adriatic presents a scene of unrivalled beauty. On the one side rise high, rugged, wooded mountains, on a ledge of which the rails are laid; on the other is a deep precipice, at whose base rolls the blue sea, dotted with lateen sails, painted in every shade of colour, and adorned with figures of saints and other popular devices. The white town staring out of the corner covers a considerable space, and places its villa-outposts high up the neighbouring hills, covered with verdure to the water's edge.

"Trieste is a polyglot settlement of Austrians, Italians, Slavs, Jews, and Greeks, of whom the two latter monopolize the commerce. It is a City dear and unhealthy to live in, over-ventilated and ill-drained. It might advantageously be called the City of Three Winds. One of these, the Bora, blows the people almost into the sea with its fury, rising suddenly, like a cyclone, and sweeping all before it; the second is named the Scirocco, which blows the drainage back into the town; and the third is the Contraste, formed by the two first-named winds blowing at once against each other. Alternating atmospherically between extremes of heat and cold, Trieste is, from a political point of view, perpetually pushing the principles of independence to the verge of disorder.

"Arrived at the railway station, there is no need to call a cab and ask to be driven to the British Consul's, since, just opposite the station and close to the sea, rises the tall block of building in which the Consulate is situated. Somewhat puzzled to choose between three entrances, the stranger proceeds to mount the long series of steps lying beyond the particular portal to which he is directed. There is a superstition, prevalent in the building and in the neighbourhood, that there are but four stories, including but one hundred and twenty steps. Whoso, after a protracted climb, finally succeeds in reaching Captain Burton's landing, will entertain considerable doubts as to the correctness of the estimate. A German damsel opens the door, and inquires whether the visitor wants to see the Gräfin or the Herr Consul.

"Captain and Mrs. Burton are well, if airily, lodged on a flat composed of ten rooms, separated by a corridor adorned with a picture of our Saviour, a statuette of St. Joseph with a lamp, and a Madonna with another lamp burning before it.[2] Thus far the belongings are all of the Cross; but no sooner are we landed in the little drawing-rooms than signs of the Crescent appear. Small but artistically arranged, the rooms, opening into one another, are bright with Oriental hangings, with trays and dishes of gold and silver, brass trays and goblets, chibouques with great amber mouthpieces, and all kinds of Eastern treasures mingled with family souvenirs. There is no carpet, but a Bedouin rug occupies the middle of the floor, and vies in brilliancy of colour with Persian enamels and bits of good old china. There are no sofas, but plenty of divans covered with Damascus stuffs. Thus far the interior is as Mussulman as the exterior is Christian; but a curious effect is produced among the Oriental mise en scène by the presence of a pianoforte and a compact library of well-chosen books. There is, too, another library here, greatly treasured by Mrs. Burton, to wit, a collection of her husband's works in about fifty volumes. On the walls are many interesting relics, models, and diplomas of honour, one of which is especially prized by Captain Burton. It is the brevet de pointe earned in France for swordsmanship. Near this hangs a picture of the Damascus home of the Burtons, by Frederick Leighton.

"As the guest is inspecting this bright bit of colour, he will be roused by the full strident tones of a voice skilled in many languages, but never so full and hearty as when bidding a friend welcome. The speaker, Richard Burton, is a living proof that intense work, mental and physical, sojourn in torrid and frozen climes, danger from dagger and from pestilence, 'age' a person of good sound constitution far less than may be supposed. A Hertfordshire man, a soldier and the son of a soldier, of mingled Scotch, Irish, and French descent, his iron frame shows in its twelfth lustre no sign of decay. Arme blanche and more insidious fever have neither dimmed his eye nor wasted his sinews.

"Standing about five feet eleven, his broad deep chest and square shoulders reduce his apparent height very considerably, and the illusion is intensified by hands and feet of Oriental smallness. The Eastern, and indeed distinctly Arab, look of the man is made more pronounced by prominent cheek-bones (across one of which is the scar of a sabre-cut), by closely cropped black hair just tinged with grey, and a pair of piercing black, gipsy-looking eyes. A short straight nose, a determined mouth partly hidden by a black moustache, and a deeply bronzed complexion, complete the remarkable physiognomy so wonderfully rendered on canvas by Leighton only a couple of seasons ago. It is not to be wondered at that this stern Arab face, and a tongue marvellously rich in Oriental idiom and Mohammedan lore, should have deceived the doctors learned in the Korán, among whom Richard Burton risked his life during that memorable pilgrimage to Mecca and Medinah, on which the slightest gesture or accent betraying the Frank would have unsheathed a hundred khanjars.

"This celebrated journey, the result of an adventurous spirit worthy of a descendant of Rob Roy Macgregor, has never been surpassed in audacity or in perfect execution, and would suffice to immortalize its hero if he had not, in addition, explored Harar and Somali-land, organized a body of irregular cavalry in the Crimea, pushed (accompanied by Speke) into Eastern Africa from Zanzibar, visited the Mormons, explored the Cameroon Mountains, visited the King of Dahomey, traversed the interior of Brazil, made a voyage to Iceland, and last but not least, discovered and described the Land of Midian.

"Leading the way from the drawing-rooms or divans, he takes us through bedrooms and dressing-rooms, furnished in Spartan simplicity with little iron bedsteads covered with bearskins, and supplied with reading-tables and lamps, beside which repose the Bible, the Shakespeare, the Euclid and the Breviary, which go with Captain and Mrs. Burton on all their wanderings. His gifted wife, one of the Arundells of Wardour, is, as becomes a scion of an ancient Anglo-Saxon and Norman Catholic house, strongly attached to the Church of Rome; but religious opinion is never allowed to disturb the peace of the Burton household, the head of which is laughingly accused of Mohammedanism by his friends. The little rooms are completely lined with rough deal shelves, containing, perhaps, eight thousand or more volumes in every Western language, as well as in Arabic, Persian, and Hindustani. Every odd corner is piled with weapons, guns, pistols, boar-spears, swords of every shape and make, foils and masks, chronometers, barometers, and all kinds of scientific instruments. One cupboard is full of medicines necessary for Oriental expeditions or for Mrs. Burton's Trieste poor, and on it is written, 'The Pharmacy.' Idols are not wanting, for elephant-nosed Gunpati is there cheek by jowl with Vishnu.

"The most remarkable objects in the rooms just alluded to are the rough deal tables, which occupy most of the floor-space. They are almost like kitchen or ironing tables. There may be eleven of them, each covered with writing materials. At one of them sits Mrs. Burton, in morning négligé, a grey choga—the long loose Indian dressing-gown of soft camel's hair—topped by a smoking-cap of the same material. She rises and greets her husband's old friend with the cheeriest voice in the world. 'I see you are looking at our tables. Every one does. Dick likes a separate table for every book, and when he is tired of one he goes to another. There are no tables of any size in Trieste, so I had these made as soon as I came. They are so nice. We may upset the ink-bottle as often as we like without anybody being put out of the way. These three little rooms are our "den," where we live, work, and receive our intimes, and we leave the doors open that we may consult over our work. Look at our view!' From the windows, looking landward, one may see an expanse of country extending for thirty or forty miles, the hills covered with foliage, through which peep trim villas, and beyond the hills higher mountains dotted with villages, a bit of the wild Karso peering from above. On the other side lies spread the Adriatic, with Miramar, poor Maximilian's home and hobby, lying on a rock projecting into the blue water, and on the opposite coast are the Carnian Alps capped with snow.

"'Why we live so high up,' explains Captain Burton, 'is easily explained. To begin with, we are in good condition, and run up and down the stairs like squirrels. We live on the fourth story because there is no fifth. If I had a campagna and gardens and servants, horses and carriages, I should feel tied, weighted down, in fact. With a flat, and two or three maidservants, one has only to lock the door and go. It feels like "light marching order," as if we were always ready for an expedition; and it is a comfortable place to come back to. Look at our land-and-sea-scape: we have air, light, and tranquillity; no dust, no noise, no street smells. Here my wife receives something like seventy very intimate friends every Friday—an exercise of hospitality to which I have no objection, save one, and that is met by the height we live at. There is in every town a lot of old women of both sexes, who sit for hours talking about the weather and the cancans of the place, and this contingent cannot face the stairs.'

"In spite of all this, and perhaps because of it—for the famous Oriental traveller, whose quarter of a hundred languages are hardly needed for the entry of cargoes at a third-rate seaport, seems to protest too much—one is impelled to ask what anybody can find to do at Trieste, an inquiry simply answered by a 'Stay and see,' with a slap on the shoulder to enforce the invitation. The ménage Burton is conducted on the early-rising principle. About four or five o'clock our hosts are astir, and already in their 'den,' drinking tea made over a spirit-lamp, and eating bread and fruit, reading and studying languages. By noon the morning's work is got over, including the consumption of a cup of soup, the ablution without which no true believer is happy, and the obligations of Frankish toilette. Then comes a stroll to the fencing-school, kept by an excellent broadswordsman, an old German trooper. For an hour Captain and Mrs. Burton fence in the school, if the weather be cold; if it is warm, they make for the water, and often swim for a couple of hours.

"Then comes a spell of work at the Consulate. 'I have my Consulate,' the Chief explains, 'in the heart of the town. I don't want my Jack-tar in my sanctum; and when he wants me, he has usually been on the spree and got into trouble.' While the husband is engaged in his official duties, the wife is abroad promoting a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, a necessary institution in Southern countries, where—on the purely gratuitous hypothesis that the so-called lower animals have no souls—the uttermost brutality is shown in the treatment of them. 'You see,' remarks our host, 'that my wife and I are like an elder and younger brother living en garçon. We divide the work. I take all the hard and scientific part, and make her do all the rest. When we have worked all day, and said all we have to say to each other, we want relaxation. To that end we have formed a little "Mess," with fifteen friends at the table d'hôte of the Hôtel de la Ville, where we get a good dinner and a pint of the country wine made on the hillside for a florin and a half. By this plan we escape the bore of housekeeping, and are relieved from the curse of domesticity, which we both hate. At dinner we hear the news, if any, take our coffee, cigarettes, and kirsch outside the hotel, then go homewards to read ourselves to sleep; and to-morrow da capo.'

"To the remark that this existence, unless varied by journeys to Midian and elsewhere, would be apt to kindle desires for fresher woods and newer pastures, Captain Burton replies, 'The existence you deprecate is varied by excursions. We know every stick and stone for a hundred miles round, and all the pre-historic remains of the country-side. Our Austrian Governor-General, Baron Pino de Friedenthal, is a first-rate man, and often gives us a cruise in the Government yacht. It is, as you say, an odd place for me to be in; but recollect, it is not every place that would suit me' (1877).

"The man, who, with his wife, has made this pied à terre in Trieste is a man unlike anybody else—a very extraordinary man, who has toiled every hour and minute for forty-four and a half years, distinguishing himself in every possible way. He has done more than any other six men in her Majesty's dominions, and is one of the best, noblest, and truest that breathes.

"While not on active service or on sick leave, he has been serving his country, humanity, science, and civilization in other ways, by opening up lands hitherto unknown, and trying to do good wherever he went. He was the pioneer for all other living African travellers. He first attempted to open up the Sources of the Nile. He 'opened the oyster for the rest to take the pearl'—his Lake Tanganyika is the head basin of the Nile.

"He has made several great expeditions under the Royal Geographical Society and the Foreign Office, most of them at the risk of his life. His languages, knowledge, and experience upon every subject, or any single act of his life, of which he has concentrated so many into forty-four and a half years, would have raised any other man to the top of the ladder of honour and fortune.

"We may sum up his career by their principal heads.

"Nineteen years in the Bombay Army, the first ten in active service, principally in the Sindh Survey on Sir Charles Napier's staff. In the Crimea, Chief of the Staff to General Beatson, and the chief organizer of the Irregular Cavalry.

"Several remarkable and dangerous expeditions in unknown lands. He is the discoverer and opener of the Lake Regions of Central Africa, and perhaps the Senior Explorer of England.

"He has been nearly twenty-six years in the Consular service in the four quarters of the globe (always in bad climates—Africa, Asia, South America, and Europe), doing good service everywhere. It would be impossible to enumerate all that Captain Burton has done in the last forty-four years; but we cannot pass over his knowledge of twenty-nine languages, European and Oriental—not counting dialects—and now that Mezzofante is dead, we may call him the Senior Linguist. Nor can we omit the fact that he has written about fifty standard works, a list of which will appear at the end of this Memoir. (See [Appendix A].)

"He is a man incapable of an untruth or of truckling to what finds favour. His wife tells us in her 'Inner Life of Syria' that 'humbug stands abashed before him,' that he lives sixty years before his time, and that, 'born of Low Church and bigoted parents, as soon as he could reason he began to cast off prejudice and follow a natural law.' Grace aiding the reason of man—upright, honourable, manly, and gentlemanly, but professing no direct form of belief, except in one Almighty Being, God—the belief that says, 'I do that because it is right—not for hell nor heaven, nor for religion, but because it is right—a natural law of Divine grace, which such men unconsciously ignore as Divine intelligence: yet such it is.'

"Perhaps this is the secret of our finding so distinguished a soldier, Government envoy, Foreign Office commissioner, author, linguist, benefactor to science, explorer, discoverer, and organizer of benefits to his country and mankind at large, standing before the world on a pedestal as a plain unadorned hero, sitting by his distant fireside in a strange land, bearing England's neglect, and seeing men who have not done a tithe of his service reaping the credit and reward of his deeds—nay, of the very ideas and words that he has spoken and written. For years he has thought, studied, and written, and in all the four quarters of the globe has been a credit to his country. For years he has braved hunger, thirst, heat, and cold, wild beasts, savage tribes; has fought and suffered, carrying his life in his hand, for England's honour and credit, and his country's praise and approbation, and done it nobly and successfully. But, like many of the greatest heroes that have ever lived, his country will deny him the meed of success whilst he lives, and erect marble statues and write odes to his memory when he can no longer see and hear them—when God, who knows all, will be his reward."

Articles by Alfred Bates Richards.

"Burton's lamented college friend, Alfred Bates Richards, the author of this biography, also wrote two leading articles expressing his opinions in the following outspoken and manly words, and, if I quote them here, it is not by way of advertising any claim Burton may have, or of intoning any grumble against any Government, for to the best of my belief the Burtons have taken up a line of their own. I quote them merely to show the estimation in which I believe him to be held by the whole Press of England, since every article is more or less written in the same tone, with scarcely a dissentient pen, and I have selected these as two of the best specimens:—

"'The best men in this world, in point of those qualities which are of service to mankind, are seldom gifted with powers of self-assertion in regard to personal claims, rewards, and emoluments. Pioneers, originators, and inventors are frequently shunted and pushed aside by those who manage, by means of arts and subtleties (utterly unknown to men of true genius and greatness of character), to reap benefits and honours to which they are not in the slightest degree entitled. Sometimes a reaction sets in and the truth is discovered—when it is too late. There is no country which neglects real merit so frequently and so absolutely as England—none which so liberally bestows its bounties upon second and third rate men, and sometimes absolute pretenders. The most daring explorer cannot find his way up official back-stairs; the most heroic soldier cannot take a salon or a bureau by storm. There are lucky as well as persevering individuals who succeed in the most marvellous way in obtaining far more than their deserts. We have heard of a certain foreigner, now dead, who held a lucrative position for many years in this country, that he so pestered and followed up the late Lord Brougham that he at last obtained the post he sought by simple force of boredom and annoyance. Some men think they ought not to be put in the position of postulants; but that recognition of their services should be spontaneous on the part of the authorities. They are too proud to ask for that which they consider it is patent they have so eminently deserved, that it is a violation of common decency to withhold it; and so they 'eat their hearts' in silence, and accept neglect with dignity, if not indifference.

"'We do not intend to apply these remarks strictly to the occasion which has suggested them. If we did not state this, we should possibly injure the cause which we are anxious to maintain. We have watched the career of an individual for some thirty-five years with interest and admiration, and we frankly own that we now think it time to express our opinion upon the neglect with which the object of that interest and admiration has been treated. We alone are responsible for the manner in which we record our sentiments. Captain Richard Burton, now her Majesty's Consul at Trieste, is, in our judgment, the foremost traveller of the age. We shall not compare his services or exploits with those of any of the distinguished men who have occupied a more or less prominent position, and whose services have been recognized by the nation.

"'He has been upwards of thirty years actively engaged in enterprises, many of them of the most hazardous description. We pass over his career in the Bombay army for nearly twenty years, during which time he acquired that wonderful knowledge of Eastern languages, which is probably unequalled by any living linguist. We shall not give even the catalogue of his varied and interesting works, which have been of equal service to philology and geography. His system of Bayonet Exercise, published in 1855, is, we may observe, en passant, the one now in use in the British army. He suffered the fate of too many of his brother officers of the Indian army when it was reduced, on changing hands, and when he was left without pension or pay.

"'He was emphatically the first great African pioneer of recent times. It is not our intention to speak disparagingly of the late Captain Speke—far from it; but it should be remembered that Speke was Burton's lieutenant, chosen by him to accompany him in his Nile researches, and that when Burton was stricken down by illness that threatened to prove fatal, Speke pushed on a little way ahead, and reaped nearly the whole credit of the discovery. Lake Tanganyika was Burton's discovery, and it was his original theory that it contained the Sources of the Nile. Never was man more cruelly robbed by fate of his just reward. Could Speke have arrived where he did without even the requisite knowledge of languages, manners of the people, etc., save under Burton's guidance? Burton's pilgrimage to Mecca and Medinah was one of the most extraordinary on record.

"'In the expedition to Somali-land, as well as that to the Lake regions of Central Africa, Speke was second in command. In the former, both were severely wounded, and cut their way out of surrounding numbers of natives with singular dash and gallantry, one of the party—Lieutenant Stroyan—being killed. Nor should the wonderful expedition, undertaken alone, to the walled town of Harar, where no European had even been known to penetrate before, be forgotten. On this occasion Captain Burton actually added a grammar and vocabulary of a language to the stores of the philologists. His journey and work on California and the Mormon country preceded that of Mr. Hepworth Dixon. He explored the West Coast of Africa from Bathurst, on the Gambia, to St. Paulo de Loanda in Angola, and the Congo River, visiting the Fans. But his visit to Dahomey was still more important, as he exposed the customs of that blood-stained kingdom, and gave information valuable to humanity as well as to civilization and science. This alone ought to have obtained for him some high honorary distinction; but he got nothing beyond a private expression of satisfaction from the Government then in power. During his four years' Consulship in Brazil his work was simply Herculean. He navigated the river San Francisco fifteen hundred miles in a canoe, visited the gold and diamond mines, crossed the Andes, and explored the Pacific Coast, affording a vast fund of information, political, geographical, and scientific, to the Foreign Office. Next we find him Consul at Damascus, where he did good work in raising English influence and credit. Here he narrowly escaped assassination, receiving a severe wound. He explored Syria, Palestine, and the Holy Land, protected the Christian population from a massacre, and was recalled by the effete Liberal Government because he was too good a man, Damascus being reduced to a Vice-Consulate in accordance with their policy of effacement. He is now shelved at Trieste, but has still managed to embellish his stay here by some valuable antiquarian discoveries.

"'If a Consulate is thought a sufficient reward for such a man and such services, we have no more to say. If he has been fairly treated in reference to his Nile explorations, we have no knowledge of the affair—which we narrowly watched at the time—no discernment, and no true sense of justice. When the war with Ashanti broke out, we expressed our opinion that Captain Burton should have been attached to the expedition. During the Crimean War he showed his powers of organization under General Beatson, whose Chief of the Staff he was, in training four thousand irregular cavalry, fit, when he left them, to do anything and go anywhere. In short, he has done enough for half a dozen men, and to merit half a dozen K.C.B.'s. We sincerely trust that the present Government will not fail, amidst other acts of justice and good works, to bestow some signal mark of her Majesty's favour upon Captain Richard Burton, one of the most remarkable men of the age, who has displayed an intellectual power and a bodily endurance through a series of adventures, explorations, and daring feats of travel, which have never been surpassed in variety and interest by any one man, and whose further neglectful treatment, should it take place, will be a future source of indignant regret to the people of England.'

"The following article appeared when Burton wrote his 'Nile Basin.' I quote that part of it which refers to Burton, and expunge that which does not regard my immediate subject:—

"'About a quarter of a century ago Richard Burton, who had gained only a reputation for eccentricity at Oxford, left that University for India and entered the Bombay army. There he devoted his spare time to the acquisition of Oriental languages, science, and falconry, in company with the Chiefs of Sind, and, amongst other things, wrote works on the language, manners, and sports of that country. We cannot trace his career, but it is well known that he has become one of the greatest linguists of the age, gifted with the rare if not unique capacity of passing for a native in various Oriental countries. In addition to this, he is a good classical scholar, an accomplished swordsman, and a crack shot. His "Pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina" was a wonderful record of successful daring and wonderful impersonation of Oriental character.

"'As an Afghan, and under the name of Mirza Abdullah, he left Southampton on his mission, after undergoing circumcision, and during the voyage on board the P. and O. steamer was only known to be a European to the captain and attaché of the Turkish Embassy returning to Constantinople. His pilgrimage was successful, and he is the only European ever known to have performed it. Perhaps, however, the story of the most remarkable of his performances is contained in his 'First Footsteps in Eastern Africa,' telling how, alone and unaccompanied, during the latter stages, even by his attendants, he penetrated the hitherto almost fabulous walled city of Harar, hobnobbed with its ferocious and exclusive Sultan, and bestowed on philologists a grammar of a new language. The description of his lying down to sleep the first night in that walled city of barbaric strangers, ignorant of the reception he might receive at the Sultan's levée in the morning, is well worth perusal.

"'Then came the episode which first gave the name of Speke to the world—the expedition in the country of the Somali, on the coast of the Red Sea, when the cords of the tent of Burton, Speke, Herne, and the hapless Stroyan were cut by a band of a hundred and fifty armed Somali during the night, after the desertion of their Eastern followers. The escape of Burton was characteristic of the man. Snatching up an Eastern sabre, the first weapon he could grasp, he cut his way by sheer swordsmanship through the crowd, escaping with a javelin thrust through both cheeks. Speke, after receiving seventeen wounds, was captured, and also subsequently escaped, and Stroyan was killed. At this time Burton had taken Speke under his especial patronage, and made him lieutenant of his expeditions. Subsequently came the search after the Sources of the Nile, in which both Burton and Speke figured; next, Burton's expedition to Utah; his Consulship at Fernando Po, and the exploration of the Cameroon Mountains; and, finally, his world-famed mission to the blood-stained Court of Dahomey. Such is Captain Richard Burton, and such his work, briefly and imperfectly described.

"'It is known, at least to the geographical world, that between Burton and his quondam lieutenant, Speke, a feud existed after the latter had proclaimed himself the discoverer of the Sources of the Nile. The outline of the story is this. On the exploring expedition under Burton's command he was seized with a violent and apparently fatal illness which compelled him to pause on the path of discovery at an advanced point. Speke went on, and, returning first to England, succeeded in getting the ear of the Geographical Society and the Foreign Office, and organized another expedition independently of Burton. On his return from this he proclaimed at once to the world that he had solved the great mystery, and the news was received with universal congratulation and belief. In the race for fame—if 'honor est à Nilo' be deemed, as it must be, the common motto of our daring travellers—Burton, shaken to the backbone by fever, disgusted, desponding, and left behind, both in the spirit and the flesh, was, in racing parlance, 'nowhere.' He had the sense to retire from the contest during the first burst of excitement, and let judgment go by default. He went to visit the Mormons, and thence, by an ascending scale in respect to the objects of his search, to leave a card or two in the forest residences of the Gorillas. In the mean time Speke became one of the lions of the day, and ignored the services of his able Chief and Pioneer. To him the good fortune, the honour, the success—to Burton, nothing. The very name and existence of the latter were, as far as possible, ignored. Yet he had commenced all, organized all, arranged all, and discovered Tanganyika. His Oriental acquirements and experiences had paved the way to at least within the last few stages of the discovery of the Nyanza. This is a matter to be regretted. Much more to be regretted was the sad and singular catastrophe of Captain Speke's untimely death. On that very day a great passage, not of Arms, but of intellect and knowledge, was fixed to take place. Burton had challenged Speke to a discussion before a select public tribunal. The subject was the Nile, its sources, and Speke's claim to their discovery.

"'On the fatal afternoon of the 16th of September, 1864, when Speke perished, Burton had met him at 1.30 p.m. in the rooms of Section E of the Bath Association. Their meeting was silent and ominous. Speke, who, as we are informed, had been suffering for some time from nervousness and depression of spirits, probably arising from the trials to his health in an Eastern climate, left the room to go out shooting, and never returned alive! Much cause had Richard Burton to lament that untimely end. His lips were, to a great extent, immediately sealed. Humanity, feeling, and decency—nay, imperious necessity—demanded this. What he has written is argumentative and moderate. He speaks of his deceased rival with commendation for those good qualities which he allows him to have possessed. Burton is as dignified in his style as if he were a true Oriental. Unhappily, Speke is now no more, but Burton has maintained throughout a chivalrous tone towards his deceased adversary.'"

Cicci.

Cicci—A Wild Race.

There is a very peculiar and wild race of men who in Trieste are called Cicci; they are Wallachians of the old Danube, and they dress in the Danubian dress, and live in Inner Istria. They are wild people, and have their own breed of wild dogs, which are of a very savage nature. A real Cicci dog costs what is for Trieste a good sum of money, if he is of pure breed; he is secured as a house-guard, and has to be tied up except at night, and, in a general way, only the person who feeds him is able to go near him. These Cicci do not live in Trieste; they live up in the Karso, or Karst, in a remote spot, in their own separate wild villages, where they have the bare necessities of life, and their occupation is charcoal-burning. Richard determined he would become acquainted with this unruly and isolated race, and he made his way to their villages alone, and stayed with them for five days, leading naturally a perfectly comfortless life, sleeping on the floor, and eating their black bread and olives. They were very pleased with him, and very civil to him; but when he came back no man in Trieste would believe that he had done it, till accidentally they saw a party of Cicci coming down to sell their charcoal, and rushing up and claiming him as an old friend. He never could resist seeing a curious and, so to speak, Ishmaelitic race, i.e. severed away from the whole world, without going to live with it, and learn it.

Opçina.

The first thing Richard always did when he arrived in a new place, was to look for a sanitarium to which he might go for change in case of being seedy. There is a Slav village, one hour from and twelve hundred feet above Trieste, called Opçina. You can drive up on a good road by zigzag wooded ways in an hour, or you may climb also in an hour by five other different rugged paths up the cliff. Once arrived at the top, Trieste, the Adriatic, and all the separate points of land, with their villages, churches, towers, villas, and objects of interest, lies before you like a raised map. There are ranges of wooded hills, cliffs dotted with churches and villages, which seem to cling to them. Sometimes banks of clouds cover the whole scene, and you can imagine yourself isolated at the north pole, the white, woolly clouds representing the snow and ice. You see nothing below you, but in the distance you see the Carnian Alps topped with snow. The house you inhabit is Daneu's old-fashioned rural country inn, on the edge of the declivity, and is a sort of outpost to the village of Opçina; and its terrace commands all this lovely view—the finest in the world. The back of the inn has shrubberies and fields, and a view of the Karso, backed by mountains. The air is splendid. We used to take the most delightful walks when up here, or make excursions in little country carts called gripizzas.

It is exceedingly pretty on festival days. Every house in the village, from the big house, the school, and Daneu's inn, to the smallest shed, hangs out its gayest drapery from the windows, and is decorated with flowers and flags. The poorest have at least a jug of large white lilies. All the villages around pour in—the Slav peasant men, in their big boots and knickerbocker-trousers, slouch hat, brown velveteen jacket, one ear-ring, and one flower jauntily cocked behind the ear.

Women with straight features, tow-coloured hair, and blue eyes, dress very like a glorified Sister of Charity, only of all the colours of the rainbow, and a white head-dress deep with lace. In short, fine linen, fine lace, white head-dress, embroidered bodice, stout shoes, and ribbons round waist and down the petticoat of all different colours, one shorter than the other, and the last a big sash, over a final petticoat, opening behind like an all-round apron, a kerchief over the shoulders, real massive gold ornaments, and flowers form the costume. The dresses are most expensive, of all colours, but nothing in bad taste.

On procession days the whole village would turn out, perhaps six priests holding a canopy over the Blessed Sacrament, the villagers with banners, flambeaux, and bells, and every one a lighted candle and a bunch of flowers; they would walk through the village and fields and lanes. There were three altars erected out of doors, before which they would stop and recite the Gospels, and then to the church for High Mass and solemn benediction; fine voices rose in hymns, taking first, second, third, and fourths, nature taught, far better than many an oratorio. On one occasion I remember a little ragged urchin, two feet high, with bare feet, one little white garment, a straw hat with a hundred holes and rents in it, and his little bit of flower, kneeling near the altar. Educated visitors from Trieste would come in, but not even salute or kneel, to show their superiority; and this is the way that Faith gets stamped out of the world. The peasants, when the fête is over, steal the flowers to dry, and they burn them in a storm for protection, which is rather a pretty, though superstitious, idea.

Here we took rooms, and put in them all in which they were deficient; and our delight was to come up alone, without servants, from Saturday to Monday, and get away from everything, wait upon ourselves more or less, and keep some literary work here. We sometimes stayed a fortnight or six weeks if we had a great work on hand.

DANEU'S INN, OPÇINA, IN THE KARSO.

Trieste Life.

The Trieste life was, of course, varied by many journeys and excursions; but we lived absolutely the jolly life of two bachelors, as it might be an elder and a younger brother. When we wanted to go, we just turned the key and left. We began our house with six rooms, and were intensely happy; but after some years I became ambitious, and I stupidly went on spreading our domain until I ran round the large block of building, and had got twenty-seven rooms. The joke in Trieste was that I should eventually build a bridge across to the next house, and run round that; but as soon as I had just got everything to perfection, in 1883, Richard took a dislike to it, and we went off to the most beautiful house in Trieste, where he eventually died, 1890.

Our first thought as soon as we were settled in Trieste was to scour every part of the country on foot, and we often used to lose our way, and on the 1st of January, 1873, we were out from 10 a.m. till 7.50 p.m. in this manner. The thing that astonished us most at first was the Bora, the north-easterly wind, which sweeps down the mountains, at a moment's notice. There are only two places in the world that have it—Trieste and the Caucasus. Its force is so great, that it blows people into the sea; it occasionally blows over a train; or a cab and horse into the sea. When there is a bad Bora, ropes are put up; if any house is exposed to the full fury of it, a new-comer would suppose that the house would also be carried away. It makes all new buildings tremble and rock; in fact, I have been told that if one tried to describe it in England, one would not be understood.

A blizzard is the nearest thing to it, but that is short and sharp, whereas the Bora always lasts three days, and I have known it, in 1890, to last forty days, more or less severe. The Borino is the little Bora; the white Bora is still bearable, but the black Bora is frightening, especially when it has "ciappá," as the dialect goes, i.e. "gripped," or "taken hold." At first Richard got thrown down by it, and was badly cut. In my strongest days, I could never breast a hill with the Bora facing me. I used to have to turn round, sit down, and be blown back again. Shocks of earthquake were very common affairs. They made one feel sick and uncomfortable; but they did not shake the houses down, only made the pictures dangle towards the middle of the room, and the cupboards nod and move. They were always the tag-end of the great earthquakes at Agram, in Croatia, which is a hundred miles away on a direct line.

The chief thing that spoils Trieste is politics. The City is composed of Italians, Austrians, and Slavs, which three languages are spoken. Greeks and Jews monopolize the trade. The few foreigners are the Consular corps; the English are the engineers of Austrian-Lloyd steamers, with a very small sprinkling of merchants, and might number three hundred all told, including British protections. When we went there, an Austrian would hardly give his hand to an Italian in a dance. An Italian would not sing in the concert where an Austrian sang. If an Austrian gave a ball, the Italian threw a bomb into it; and the Imperial family were always received with a chorus of bombs—bombs on the railway, bombs in the gardens, bombs in the sausages; in fact, it was not at such times pleasant. The Slavs also form a decided party. With Richard's usual good sense, he at once desired me to form a neutral house—a neutral salon—where politics and religion should never be mentioned, and where all would meet on neutral ground; and this was done the whole time of our Triestine career.

Here we made the acquaintance of the Count and Countess di Ferraris-Occhieppo, their son and two daughters. They were at this time charming children. He was in the Austrian service. They were of noble family, but not rich, and she had the romantic idea of bringing her daughters up to a musical profession, of travelling all over the world for the purpose of seeing and studying, and leading an interesting life, paying their way with concerts and entertainments as they went. She nobly succeeded in her mission, and must be rewarded by looking down upon her two clever daughters carrying out her idea in perfection. The little boy—he must be a man, and possibly an officer now—used to rebel against the constant drill; but I dare say, though I have lost sight of him for the present, that he is very glad of it now.

Trieste Environs.

Venice was our happy hunting-ground. Whenever we were a little bit tired of Trieste, we had only to run over there, and I know nothing so resting. If you have been living at too high pressure, you order your gondola, closing the door, lie down in the middle of it, put your head on a cushion, tell them to row you anywhere, and doze and dream until you come round.

Miramar, the sea-palace of poor Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, was a great resource to Trieste people, being an hour's drive from Trieste, built on a rock-promontory out to sea, and backed by beautiful grounds and woods of his own designs. Most people know—but some may not—the touching little history of the Emperor of Austria's brother, married to Princess Charlotte of Belgium, who lived in this palace. They built and made this home themselves, and they lived in a little cottage close by whilst they were so engaged. The lower rooms, occupied by the Archduke himself, were built and arranged exactly like the Admiral's quarters of his ship. The grounds are most romantic and fanciful, full of covered terraces, shady walks, secluded places for reading, the ruins of a very old chapel, Italian gardens, and so on.

They were perfectly adored in Trieste, and he was worshipped by the Navy. Nothing could be happier than their lives. In an evil hour the Imperial Crown of Mexico was offered to him under the protection of Louis Napoleon. The Emperor of Austria approved of it, but Maximilian long hung back. Finally Princess Charlotte, who was ambitious, urged him to accept; he did so, and they departed. There is a picture in Miramar showing their departure in the ship's gig, and crowds from Trieste to see them off, of which most are real portraits. That was their last happy day. Everybody knows how ill that Imperial Mexican crown succeeded, Maximilian's unhappy death, Empress Charlotte's coming over to claim the promised protection of Napoleon, and how the not getting it affected her brain. At one time they took her to Miramar to see if it would cure her, but it only made her worse. The Emperor keeps up his brother's place exactly as if he was living there, and, with exquisite taste and benevolence, throws it open to the people who loved him so much.

Monsieur and Madame Léon Favre, brother to Jules Favre, were our French Consul and Consuless General, and their house was the rendezvous for Spiritualism, where we had frequent séances.

One of their guests at these séances had a very curious faculty. He would sit opposite you, his eyes would glaze, and your face and features changed in his sight, and he saw all the evil in you and all the good, just as if you were a pane of glass. When this fit passed off, his face, and yours also, resumed its natural expression, but he knew you perfectly well, better than if you had told him all your life. I was fortunate enough to please him. He sent for me on his death-bed, but I was away, and did not know it till after; but a year or two after his death, one of his disciples swam up to me in the sea and said that the deceased wanted me to translate and bring out his writings on religion, which were inspired. I have, however, up to the present never had the time nor the money to do so.

Richard sent the following, thinking it might be useful:—

"To the Editor of the Pall Mall Gazette.

"Precaution in fighting the Ashantees.

"Sir,—During the last Franco-Prussian War several of my friends escaped severe wounds by wearing in action a strip of hard leather with a rib or angle to the fore. It must be large enough to cover heart, lungs, and stomach-pit, and it should be sewn inside the blouse or tunic; of course the looser the better. Such a defence will be especially valuable for those who must often expose themselves in 'the bush' to Anglo-Ashanti trade-guns, loaded with pebbles and bits of iron. The sabre is hardly likely to play any part in the present campaign, or I should recommend my system of curb-chains worn across the cap, along the shoulders, and down the arms and legs.

"I am, sir, your obedient,

"Richard F. Burton.

"November 25th, 1873."

Rome and the Tiber.

When we had been there a little while, Richard took it into his head to make a pilgrimage to Loretto, and from there we went on to Rome, seeing twenty-six towns on our way. Here we made acquaintance with our Ambassador, Sir Augustus, and clever, beautiful, charming Lady Paget; also we saw much of Cardinal Howard (who was a connection of mine, and was one of my favourite dancing partners when he was in the Life Guards, and I was a girl), and Mgr. Stonor, Archbishop of Trebizond, between whom and Lady Ashburton we had a delightful time in Rome.

Richard, who had passed a good deal of time here in his boyhood, liked visiting the old places and showing them to me. It would take three months of high pressure and six quiet months to see everything in Rome; but during our short stay, under his guidance, I saw and enjoyed all the principal and best things, and he amused himself with writing long articles on Rome, which came out in Macmillan's Magazine, 1874-5. Religiously speaking, what I enjoyed most was the Ara Cœli, the church built on the site of the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus (I wish I knew all the things that have taken place on that site). The other place was the Scala Santa. His Holiness Pius IX., unfortunately for me, went to bed ill the day before I arrived, and got up well the day after I left, so that I did not see him. We also much enjoyed the Catacombs and the Baths of Caracalla; but it was a wet and miserable day that we went to the Baths, and the smells in this last place from the little interstices of the pavement were awful. We dined at some cousins' who had gone with us, and their little bulldog, which had had its nose close to the ground all day, went mad, and died that night, and we found them next day in shocking grief. I got Roman fever. Richard had written the following letter to the Tablet in October, 1872:—

"The Overflow of the Tiber.

"To the Editor of the Tablet.

"Sir,—The very able review in the Times supplement (Oct. 21) of Signor Raffaelle Pareto's report to the Minister of Agriculture, encourages me to address you upon a subject so deeply interesting to the Catholic world, indeed to the whole world, as Rome is.

"That eminent engineer, Mr. Thomas Page (acting engineer of the Thames Tunnel, under Brunel, and the engineer of Westminster Bridge), whose works in England are known to all, has been for some time engaged in a plan for preventing the inundations of the Tiber, and for the assainissement of the Campagna di Roma, undertakings more urgently required every year. He purposes gigantic measures, but measures of no difficulty, and the sooner they are begun and the more promptly they are erected, the more satisfactory will be their results and the more economical their execution.

"Your space will hardly allow me to enter into details concerning his scheme, whose broadest outlines are as follows: Provide a new channel for the Tiber, which, during floods, shall conduct all its waters in a free and uninterrupted course. For the sake of crossing, the line must be governed by the levels of the valley through which it runs. It may be constructed at the junction of the Teverone with the Tiber, be carried along the line of the Fossa della Maranella, and, passing through the higher ground in the line of the second milestone on the Via Tusculana da Roma, it would enter the depression of the Fiume Alarone, and finally anastomose with the old bed near the Ponto della Moletta, about a kilometre and a quarter outside the Porta San Paolo. Mr. Page would continue his new channel so as to cut off the reach of the Prati di S. Paolo, passing to the west of the celebrated Basilica, so called, and, by an embankment with gates and sluices at the sharp bend near the Porta della Puzzolana, he would convert the old channel into the Port of Rome. At the embouchure of the Teverone he would throw a similar embankment; and thus the Tiber, cleansed of all mud and deposits, would become an ornamental stream, or rather lake whose banks, about three miles long, would be the most pleasant of promenades. I need hardly remark that this insulation of Rome, and this replacement by drainage and irrigation of the fatal Campagna atmosphere, would amazingly increase the value of the land, and make the profits of its sale pay for the expenses of the works.

"The Times review of Signor Pareto's labours has sketched for the benefit of the general reader all the interesting features of pasturage and tillage in the large towns known as the Agro Romano. Mr. Page's plan would give the opportunity and the means of training the Campagna into one of the most productive and salubrious districts in Italy. With an extent of 311,550 hectares of valuable land, with a new channel for drainage, and with improved means of irrigation, the suburban district of Rome will soon become worthy of her greatness, past and present.

"I only hope that Mr. Page will soon be permitted to publish in detail this sketch, whose outlines you have allowed me to make public. The Holy City, I need hardly say, is not so much the capital of Italy as the capital of Europe, and consequently the capital of the world.

"I am, sir, yours truly,

"Richard F. Burton, F.R.G.S.

"Southampton, October 24th, 1872."

The Tiber business after this was brought out as a brand-new-idea by another man in 1874, so I had to write the following:—

"The Tiber.

"To the Editor of the Pall Mall Gazette.

"Sir,—I venture to draw your attention to the fact that as early as October, 1872, my husband, Captain Burton, proposed the very same measures for relieving the Tiber and for draining the Campagna which are now being taken up by General Garibaldi. Also the paper by Captain Burton, 'Notes on Rome,' published by Macmillan's Magazine in 1873, concluded as follows: 'At the present moment Anglo-Italian companies are out of favour in England and in Italy. It would be an invidious task to explain the reason and to register the complaints on both sides. But there should be no difficulty in raising a "City of Rome Improvements Company," directed by a board which would combine southern thrift with northern energy and capital, a combination hitherto found wanting. Nor do I think that the Municipality of Rome, in whose hands lies acceptance or refusal, would object to the influx of foreign funds, especially if the management were in part confided to their own countrymen—to persons of name and position.'

"These last sentences were the very gist of the whole of the 'Notes on Rome,' but, unhappily, Macmillan's, being an uncommercial magazine, thought proper to omit them, with that unfortunate instinct which taboos one's best bits, and crushes down one's originality until one's work is cut out exactly on the regulation pattern of former writers. This makes author's work in England rather disheartening; for, as in this case, one man sows and another reaps; one invents and originates, and another gets the whole benefit and credit of the idea.

"Captain Burton has had all his plans for the benefit of Rome laid down ever since 1872.

"Yours obediently,

"Isabel Burton.

"March 17th, 1874."

We took my fever on to Assisi, Perugia, Cortona, and to Lake Thrasimene, which is lovely, and to Florence. How flat and ugly is Roman country, the valley of the Tiber, and the Sabine Hills, but after an hour and a half express it becomes beautiful. In Florence we had the pleasure of seeing a great deal of "Ouida" and Lady Orford, who was the Queen of Florence. Thence we went on to Pistojia and Bologna, thence to Venice, and, after a while, back to Trieste in a night of terrible gales.

Vienna.

We only stayed here just to change baggage, as Richard was engaged as reporter to a newspaper for the Great Exhibition of Vienna. I will only say en passant that the journey from Trieste to Vienna by express (fifteen hours) is stupendously lovely for the first six hours, and likewise all round Graz, halfway to Vienna; and the passage over the Semmering is a dream, at any rate for the first and second time. We were three weeks at Vienna. The Exhibition was very fine; the buildings were beautiful; there were royalties from every Court in the world, so that the mob could feast their eyes on them thirty at a time—not that a foreign mob ever stares rudely at royalties. But the Exhibition was spoilt by one or two things. Firstly, the hotels made everything so dear that few people could afford to go there. It is told of Richard, that while travelling on a steamboat he seated himself at the table and called for a beefsteak. The waiter furnished him with a small strip of that article. Taking it upon his fork, and turning it over and examining it with one of his peculiar looks, he coolly remarked, "Yes, that's it. Bring me some."

As a pendant to that, it was during the Viennese Exhibition when supplies at the hotels were charged enormous prices, and all portions were most homœopathic. A waiter brought Richard a cup of coffee, not Turkish coffee, but a doll's cup with the chestnut water which Europeans presume to call coffee. "What is that?" asked Richard, looking at it curiously, with his head on one side. "Coffee for one, sir." "Oh! is it indeed?" inspecting it still more curiously. "H'm! bring me coffee for ten!" "Yes, sir," said the waiter, looking as if he thought it a capital joke, and presently returned with a common-sized cup of coffee.

People waited until the end, hoping things would get cheaper, and by that time the great "Krach," or money failures, had come, followed by the cholera, so that Vienna was huge sums to the bad, instead of gaining. We had a very gay time. Whilst we were there we went to the Viennese Court. There was a great difficulty about Richard, because Consuls are not admissible at the Vienna Court; but upon the Emperor being told this, he said, "Fancy being obliged to exclude such a man as Burton because he is a Consul! Has he no other profession?" And they said, "Yes, your Majesty; he has been in the Army." So he said, "Oh, tell him to come as a military man, and not as a Consul."

The Imperial Family.

It was three weeks of incessant Society and gaiety. I do not know when I have met so many delightful people. I was very much dazzled by the Court; I thought everything so beautifully done, so arranged to give every one pleasure, and somehow it was a graciousness that was in itself a welcome. I shall never forget the first night that I saw the Empress, a vision of beauty clothed in silver, crowned with water-lilies, with large roses of diamonds and emeralds round her small head, in her beautiful hair, and descending all down her dress in festoons. The throne-room is immense, with marble columns down each side. All the men are ranged on one side, all the women on the other, and the new presentations, with their Ambassadors and Ambassadresses, nearest the throne. When the Empress and Emperor come in they walk up the middle, the Emperor bowing, and the Empress curtsying most gracefully and smiling a general gracious greeting. They then ascended the throne, and presently she turned to our side. The presentations first took place, and she spoke to each one in their own language and on their own particular subject. I was quite entranced with her beauty, her cleverness, and her conversation. She passed down the ladies' side, and then came up that of the men, the Emperor doing exactly the same as she had done. He also spoke to us. Then some few of us, whose families the Empress knew about, were asked to sit down, and refreshments were handed round, the present Dowager Lady Dudley sitting by her. It is a thing never to be forgotten to have seen these two beautiful women sitting side by side. The Empress Frederick of Germany was also there, and sent for some of us on another day, which was, in many ways, another memorable event, and the Crown Prince, as he was then, also came in.

It is not to be wondered at that the Austrians are so loyal and wrapped up in their Imperial family. Everything they do is so gracious, and the Emperor enters so keenly into all the events that occur to his people. He is such a thoroughly good man. If they called him their "father," as the Russians do their Czar, it would not be wondered at. At the time that I write of, and for many, many years later, poor Prince Rudolph was literally adored by the people; he had such a charming way of speaking to them. I remember when he came to Trieste from Vienna in early days, an old woman of the people knew he would arrive cold and uncomfortable after fifteen hours' express, and she prepared a nice cup of coffee and hot milk, and rolls and butter, and the moment the train came in she ran up to the carriage with her tray and offered it him, and he received it with such hearty good will and thanks that she was quite overcome, and he put forty florins on her tray. He did many unknown acts of good to the people during his short life, and one could so well understand the enthusiasm felt by the people—not much danger of a republic there. It does not matter where you go in Austria; you might be looking at the oldest church, or the most antique ruin, and your guide will say to you, "On that particular spot stood our Emperor ten years ago;" "Last August the Empress admired that view;" "Prince Rudolph went up those stairs when he was a child;" "He sat on that chair, and we never allow anybody to touch it;" and so on.

To return to the dearness of the hotels which choked strangers off: our humble bill—and we had had nothing but absolute necessaries—was £163 for three weeks. The landlord having assured us that it would be very small, and as the Embassy had taken the rooms for us at fifteen florins a day, we did not think it was good taste to make a fuss about it, so we paid it; and on examining it we found the rooms were charged twenty-five florins a day; single cups of tea in one's bedroom, ten and sixpence apiece; a carriage to convey and set one down at the Exhibition, and to pick one up in the evening back to the hotel, £5 a day for the first few days, and so on. I heard one of the Rothschilds making an awful to-do about £100 for a month, but I thought we, far smaller fry, were much worse off. These things were bruited about, and very few people dared to come. I was taken to one of the great dressmakers' establishments, and what they showed me for £30 I am sure my maid would not have worn, and it was only when they began to show me things from £70 to £90 that they were good enough for me. In England one would have paid £15 or £20 for these last-named dresses.

Charley Drake now arrived on a visit to us, and we went up to see the great Government fête at the Adelsberg Caves. On that one day the Government lights this ninth wonder of the world with a million candles. The remarkable stalactite caverns and grottoes are of the most curious and fantastic shapes, and about seven miles of them are open; then the torrent that rushes into them plunges underground, and comes up again in another part of the Karso, that wild and desolate stony tract of land above Trieste, which is about seventy-five miles each way, and contains some seventy-two Slav villages. It is a mysterious, unnatural, weird land, full of pot-holes, varying from two hundred to two thousand feet deep, abounding in castellieri—prehistoric ruins—waters that disappear and reappear, that bound into the earth at one spot and rush out again some miles distant; and this is supposed to be the safeguard of Trieste against disastrous earthquakes.

Fiume.

Books might be written about it; but the passing stranger in a train would only say, that when God Almighty had finished making the earth, He had thrown all the superfluous rocks there. Then in these mysterious and wonderful caverns there is a large hall like a domed ball-room, formed by nature, and here Austrian bands play at one of the Whitsun fêtes, and the peasants flock down from all parts in their costumes. It is a thing to be seen once in one's life. Richard nearly lost his life here (not on this occasion) by insisting on swimming down the stream, which is ice cold, and wanting to let himself be carried under the mountains to see where he would come out. It was a foolhardy thing, and fortunately he was so cramped before he neared the hole where the water disappears, that he had to be pulled out. I need not say that I was not there, or he would never have been allowed to go in. However, he discovered fish without eyes, which he sent to the Zoological Gardens. From here we drove on to Fiume, about an eight-hour drive—ten with a rest—where we were kindly received by Mr. and Mrs. Smith, née Lever. From their house we visited all the neighbourhood, little thinking that fifteen years later we should come back to Abbazia for Richard's health, and we had the pleasure of making acquaintance with Mr. Whitehead and family of torpedo fame. We then went to Pola, the great naval station, the Spithead of the Austrians. The general world may not know that it has a Colosseum almost, if not quite, as good as that at Rome, with temples, ancient gates, and any amount of ruins.

"Captain Burton's Discoveries in Istria.

"(Anthropological Report.)

"Tizu, February 18, 1874.

Castellieri.

"The meeting of the London Anthropological Society held last night was devoted to the account by Captain Burton of his recent extraordinary discoveries in Istria, and was certainly the most interesting and crowded meeting which has taken place since the palmy days of Dr. Hunt and the great Negro question.

"Captain Burton, as most of our readers know, was sent last year by the late Liberal Government to a Consulate at Trieste, and there were many who thought that the lack of interest which the public generally feels in this extremely dull town would induce the gallant Captain to lead a quieter scientific life than he had hitherto followed at Brazil or Damascus. But he has devoted the first holiday he had to the excavation of a new series of prehistoric antiquities. The very existence of the Istrian castellieri was a secret to England. The well-known authority on rude stone monuments, James Fergusson, wrote to Captain Burton that nothing was known of the castellieri, and that a description was interesting and important, as showing they are or are not connected with the prehistoric monuments of Sardinia, or the Giants' Towers of Malta, or the Balearic Isles. The Mediterranean Islands contain many stray antiquities of whose origin we know nothing, and we must wait till congeners are found for us on the continent of Europe. As all schoolboys know, at the northern extremity of the Adriatic Gulf there lies a little triangle of land. This is Istria. Its position must have rendered it in early times a fit habitation, for uncivilized man would naturally prefer it to the cold and sterile Austrian provinces north-east and east of it. The neighbourhood of the sea supplies it with abundant winter rains. The peninsula was doubtless inhabited in early ages, and local students still trace in the modern Veneto-Italian speech remnants of the old Illyrian Istri, or Histri, whose dialect has been vaguely connected with Etruscan, Nubian, Illyrian, Keltic, Greek, and Phœnician. Various barbarous tribes occupied it, and successive revolutions and incursions of many ancient populations have left their traces on the manners, customs, and language of the people. Overrun by the barbarians, subject to a succession of conquerors, annexed by Venice, colonized by Slavs, Istria has been copiously written about. Captain Burton gave an enormous series of references to the past history of the bibliography of Istria, which reflected the greatest possible glory on the natives of a small province of Austria, who have worked up their own country's history to an extent which English antiquaries can scarcely rival. But the pith of Captain Burton's paper was, of course, the minute description of the castellieri themselves. These were hill forts of which a perfect military disposition was effected, so that on all occasions two points were always in sight for convenience of signalling. The experienced eye can always detect at a distance the traces of an earthen ring or ellipse formed by levelling the summit and the gradual rises of the roads, or rather camps, which are, as a rule, comparatively free from trees and thickets. A nearer inspection shows a scatter of pottery, whose rude sandy paste contrasts sharply with the finished produce of the Roman kilns, and the more homogeneous materials of modern times. The contours of these castellieri are distinguished by a definite deposit of black ash from the surface soil of 'red' Istria around them. As a rule, the castellieri occupied the summits of the detached conical hills and mounds which appear to have been shaped and turned by glacial action. Some Istrian towns have been built upon these prehistoric sites. Viewed from below, they appear to be perched upon the summits of inaccessible stone walls. A crow's nest, with a stick driven through it, is the only object they suggest from afar, and they wear a peculiarly ghastly look, like the phantom of settlements when seen through the mists of a dark evening. They can scarcely be called villages, but rather towns in miniature. The whole peninsula was at one time studded over with these villages, and Fate has treated them with her usual caprice. Some have been carried off bodily, especially those lying near the lines of modern road. Others are in process of disappearance, being found useful for villages, and on the heights for the rude huts of the shepherd and the goatherd. But where situation, which determines such 'eternal cities of the world' as Damascus, was favourable, the castellieri, as at Pisino, became successively castles, hamlets, and towns, with the fairest prospects of being promoted to the honour of cityhood. On the other hand, Muggia-Vecchia, on the Bay of Trieste, has in turn been a castle and a church tower, and now it is a ruin. Captain Burton gave a minute description of fifteen castellieri in the territory of Albona. The Cunzi hillock was the chief of these. It is a dwarf, 'lumpy chine,' about a mile long, disposed north-north-east to south-south-west, with lowlands on all sides. The crest of the cone has evidently been cut away in one or more places, leaving part of the original earth-slope to form the parapet base. Upon this foundation were planted large blocks of limestone, sometimes of two cubic yards, in tolerably regular order, invariably without mortar, and never of cut or worked blocks, the tout forming a rough architecture of the style commonly called Cyclopean. The inner thickness of the parapet was apparently fitted with smaller stones, and the thickness varied from eighteen to thirty-one feet. The inner scarp was steep and clear of rubbish. The enceinte, where probably were kept the cattle and goats belonging to the villagers, was mostly grass-grown. In another of the castellieri were found some interesting specimens of stone weapons. All were of the polished category popularly called 'neolithic.' Captain Burton has not found, through any of his researches in Istria, any of the ruder and older type. Most were composed of stone usual in the country. These tools and weapons seem to have travelled as far as Couries. Captain Burton gave a minute description of Trieste, in which the opera-house is old and unclean, fit only for a pauper country town, and the water supply is a disgrace to a civilized community. Here a sterile politic occupies the talent and energy which should be devoted to progress, and an inveterate party feeling prevails. Upon every conceivable proposal there are, and there must be, Vandals of opposite opinions, and the unfortunate city does not know which way to turn. It is a relief to revert to the castellieri. It is not difficult, with the aid of old experience and a little imagination, to restore the ancient savage condition of the settlement. The traveller, and especially the African traveller, has the advantage of having lived in prehistoric times. The villages were probably of wood and thatch, and the huts were of the conical or beehived shape of the lower races, rather than of the squares and parallelograms which mark a step in civilization. The walls were from six to seven feet high, allowing the war-men to use their stones and arrows, and a clear space, where the youths kept guard with axe, spear, and club, separated the huts from the enceinte. The gateways were closed by fascines. As the territory of Albona contains at least twenty castellieri, the population of the district of Eastern Istria would not number less than ten thousand souls. The inhabitants supported themselves by some form of agriculture. Deer, bears, and wolves were rare. Hares, foxes, badgers, and martens were as common as they continue to be. The live stock was penned between the outer and the inner walls. A total want of water supply shows that the days of sieges had not dawned, and that the simple act of taking refuge within the enceinte determined the retreat of the attacking party. The inhabitants were probably cannibals, and their morality was like that of all savage races. The women were not wholly ignorant of spinning. There was no attempt at partitions to the huts, but the polygamist savages turned their progeny out of doors as soon as possible. The fish were shot with arrows, and the hook and line were unknown.

"So ended Captain Burton's interesting paper, which, read in extenso by Dr. Carter Blake, produced an animated discussion. Specimens of the tiles from the castellieri were exhibited on the table, and produced much examination. The President of the Anthropological Society (Dr. R. S. Charnock, F.S.A.) said with regard to the name Istria, it was stated that Colchians having sailed up the Ister, or Danube, passed from that river to the Adriatic, and that they named Istria from the Ister. But, as Spon observes, if the Colchians proceeded from the Ister to the Adriatic, they must have carried their vessels on their shoulders, inasmuch as there is no water communication between the Ister and the Adriatic. Something of this sort is mentioned by Pliny, who seems to have led Spon to make this ludicrous observation. Great gratification appeared to be felt by the members of the Society, that Captain Burton, while he assigned the castellieri to a pre-Roman age, did not identify them with any special race or period. In fact, the caution with which he described all his facts led observers to regard the present as one of the most important contributions to prehistoric literature which has been ever published.

"The meeting passed a hearty vote of thanks to Captain Burton, who is now continuing his researches on the castellieri. The discussion verged on analogous relics. Some remains have been found in Sussex which gullible antiquaries might suppose to be analogous to the Istrian castellieri. But the importance of the 'hill forts,' as some ignorant speculators have called them, is about as much as that of the mound which Scott's Antiquary identified as a Roman prætorium. No educated savant in England believes in the hoax which was played off on the Society of Antiquaries (vol. xlii. pt. i. p. 27) with regard to the hill forts of Sussex, and the genuineness of the relics from Cissbury is not now asserted. We cannot, therefore, in the present state of science, say that the remains discovered by Captain Burton are analogous with any other remains in any other part of Europe, and we must rather look for their representatives in Asia and Africa."

One of our favourite drives was to Lipizza, the Emperor's stud. It was established three hundred years ago. It is about two hours from Trieste. You come to a kind of farm, where you may get something to eat. You are then taken to the stables, where the Emperor keeps about nine thoroughbred Arab stallions, and afterwards you are taken through the park, where are herds of thoroughbred mares, chiefly Hungarians and Croats, most of them with foals, perhaps two hundred including foals. If anything is not perfect it is sold, and thus you see a very good breed of horses, in Trieste, often drawing a cart. The pleasantest way to make this trip for your own comfort is to take a luncheon basket for yourself and nosebags with corn for your horses, as well as a small tub or pail to draw water for them, as nothing will induce them—and rightly—to let your horses come anywhere near the stud, or to drink out of anything belonging to their horses, and two hours there and two hours back is a long way for animals to go without drink or any refreshment.

We had now, after six months, taken our first lodging in Trieste, and we showed Charley Drake all our wonderful country around. Here we had a visit from Schapira of famous memory. One of the charms near Trieste is Aquilea, where there is a museum with all its antiquities; and there was then, until a year or two ago, Doctor Gregorutti and his charming wife and family, who had a far more choice collection than that of the museum, of every sort of thing; but most interesting were his incised gems. He was very anxious to sell his little collection for £4000, which was very reasonable considering what he possessed; though we tried hard we were not successful in obtaining purchasers, and he has since died. There you could see country Italian life in a country-house.

There was another place, called San Bartolo, where people used to go to sup by the sea on summer evenings, about half an hour's drive from Trieste.

Duino.

Duino is also another romantic place where we frequently went and passed some weeks. The castle and the village belong to the Princess von Hohenlöhe, who is the châtelaine of all the country round, and lives there with her sons and daughters, who were good friends to us all the time we were there. The castle is a romantic and ancient pile, built on a rock overhanging the sea. The next promontory to that is Miramar, and from Trieste we can see both, and especially from our last home, which was also on a wooded promontory projecting into the sea. There are beautiful excursions to be taken by steamer all round the Bay of Trieste.

Venice—Good-bye to Charley Drake.

We crossed over to Venice to see Charley Drake off, when he was obliged to leave us. The Governor's (Ceschi's) party took the whole of the saloon. There were seventy-two first-class passengers, and only twenty-two beds. We passed a delightful night on deck on the skylights, and were awfully amused at the Governor and his wife coming up and envying us, and saying, "You English always know how to get the best places." "We like that," said Richard, "when you have taken the whole of the saloon. It might have been blowing great guns, and seas washing over the deck, and we should have had to sleep here all the same."

In those days, in Venice, a gondolier serenade by moonlight was rather a romantic thing; you paid a hundred and twenty francs. There were choice singers in one large gondola full of coloured lamps; the voices were good. They sang Tasso and Dante, as well as popular songs, and little by little some two hundred gondolas would follow. It was like hunting a fox; you pursued the music gondola under the Rialto, and then came the best singing. Now two gondolas come at once, and try who can bawl the other down under the hotel windows, and sing all sorts of things that one is dead tired of. Latterly it used to drive my husband out of Venice.

Poor Charley Drake left on the 4th of July. We never saw him again; he was dead the following year.

This summer (1874) we got very bad Asiatic cholera, which lasted some three or four months. It killed sixteen daily, and many of them (in fact, I believe most) were ill a very short time; some cases that I know were dead in about half an hour, turning black. When its virulence was going off, I was very bad for fifteen hours; but Richard treated me, and we did not tell anybody what it was, as these things are not advisable, or, at least, were not in those days. At Venice they used to put a gendarme at the door, and, by way of stamping it out, nobody was allowed either to come in or to go out. We had seen so much of it in other countries that we knew quite well what to do if anything could save us, and Richard did not then catch it at all.

This is one of the notes in my journal: "We all felt quite poisoned to-day by a sudden hurricane of wind and dust, which set people howling and running, blew the sea-baths to pieces, and upset the little steamer." These are the sort of delightful surprises that the weather gives one from time to time.

We always had plenty of visitors from England in spring and autumn. At that time Lord Henry Percy, Lord Antrim, and Lord Lindsay came to see us, and Mr. Henry Matthews, our late Home Secretary, Sir Charles Sebright, and Mr. Peyton, popularly known as "Jack Peyton."

Excursions.

One interesting inland excursion was to Prevald, a day's drive. We slept at a peasant's house, and supped on bread and butter, olives, sardines, sausage, and cheese. Next day being Sunday, we went to the village church; the Slav peasants were there in their costumes; the sermon was in Slav, the church clean, and the peasants, though untaught, sang in perfect harmony, with no false notes. Afterwards we ascended the Nanos, a high mountain with snow on it. Prevald, a bright little white Slav village, consists of one street, every house of which is of different shape, with thatched or tiled roofs and wood. It owns a long three-cornered square, a little white church with its pepperbox steeple, its shady grassy graveyard, and wooded hills and mountains; and this description would do for most of the villages. The Nanos is like a big dome, backing the village, from the top of which is a wonderful view.

From here we drove on through splendid mountain scenery to Vipach; there is a village and a castle on a peak, containing a local Marquis de Carabbas. The river rises from under a rock. We drove through a wild, desolate part of the Karso; the heat was burning, the drive jolting, and on the road Richard had a small attack of cholera.

This summer I unearthed my material, and wrote "Inner Life of Syria," which occupied me sixteen months; and we made excursions to Pinguete and San Canziano, where there are also interesting caves on a minor scale than Adelsberg, and where a river dives into the earth.

On the 21st of September there were public prayers and Communion in the churches to stay the cholera; about five hundred went to Communion at a time.

This year also we first had the opera Aïda. We always get our operas in Trieste fresh from La Scala many years before England gets them.

Proselytizing.

Richard had always one good story to tell that delighted him. The Consular Chaplain, the Rev. Robert O'Callaghan, and I were very good friends. When I greeted him I told him I hoped he would not mind my not belonging to his Church, and he said it need make no difference in our friendship; and, on the other hand, I took care that the Consul's wife being a Catholic should be no detriment to the Protestant Church, nor the cause of the Protestant community lacking any assistance. After we got intimate Richard declared that with a triumphant wave I said, "I have got a convert from your Church." Now, proselytizing does not enter into my occupations, but the fact is that one day my Italian Capuchin confessor, a most holy man, told me that he had got a Protestant under instruction, and he desired that I should be godmother at his reception into the Church. I said, "Certainly, Father; but I think I should like to have a look at him first." When I did look at him, and he had retired, I said, "I think, Father, it is just possible that he may be a convict on leave." "Oh, daughter," he said, with a very shocked look, "he has a beautiful soul under that very rough exterior!" "Well," I said, "Father, it is your business; you ought to know." Accordingly the unprepossessing young man was "received," and I stood godmother. About a month after he was taken up as being the head of a gang of house-breakers, when of course I jeered at my horrified padre, and Mr. O'Callaghan had a tremendous crow over me. But shortly after Richard and I were invited to be present officially at the reception and baptizing in the Protestant church of two converted Jews, and we attended, and there were great rejoicings, but it was not long before they robbed the till and bolted, so I had the laugh back again. Richard rejoiced very much over our mutual conversions, and used to like to tell the story.

On the 28th of November there was a general return thanks in the churches for the cessation of the cholera.

On the 27th of December Richard and I were summoned to visit her Majesty Maria Theresa, ex-Queen of Spain, widow of old Don Carlos. We were very graciously received. She gave me two books, a holy picture, and the photographs of herself and her late husband.

Early in January, 1874, Maria Theresa Contessa de Montelin, ex-Queen of Spain, again sent for me. She gave me a Prayer-book, and she bequeathed to me all her pious works, begging of me to keep up and to promote certain pious societies which she had either started or wished to start. One was the Apostleship of Prayer, whose members were to take an active Sister of Charity part, doing good works, corporal and spiritual, in the town. I accepted the charge, and she died on the 17th of January. The following day we went to condole with the departed princess's entourage, and to pay our respects to the dead, who lay in state. I may mention, en passant, under my hand, that the members eventually increased to fifteen thousand, inscribed in a book; they made me President, and, with the assistance of my Capuchins, we got it into very good working order, dividing ourselves into bands in various quarters of the City, and did a great deal of good. After my husband died (after my sixteen years' work), there was a formal meeting in their church for me to hand over my Presidency to my successor.

One of our amusements in Trieste was, that whenever a ship came in with a captain we knew, he would invite us to dine, and we used to taste English food and see English people, and invite the captain and officers or any especially nice passengers back again.

Richard writes and foretells in his journal, 1873: "It is noticeable that even in 1873 Fiume will ruin Trieste. This place has not long to live."

Richard is very Ill.

In May, 1874, Richard and others made an expedition up the Schneeberg Mountain, which is always covered with snow. He used to amuse himself by buying any amount of clothes and greatcoats, which were hanging up in rows, and he always went out lightly clad to harden himself, so he started off with a little thin coat and thin shoes, and he did the expedition; and when the others were housed and warm, he would do more than anybody else, and sleep out in the snow. We had done that when we were obliged (as, for instance, in Teneriffe), but this was not obligatory; it was a very different climate. When he arrived back home it was a dreadful day, and six o'clock in the morning, and three days afterwards he was taken very ill quite suddenly; inflammation settled in the groin, a tumour formed, and he suffered tortures.

The doctor told me that it was going to be a long illness, so I telegraphed home for good port wine and all sorts of luxuries, and put two beds on rollers, so as to be able easily to change him from one to the other, and a couch for myself, so that I might sleep when he slept. We had seventy-eight days and nights of it. The tumour had to be cut out, and afterwards it was discovered that the surgeon had not gone deep enough, and it had to be done again. The doctor and the surgeon came twice a day, and they taught me to dress the wound. I was afraid his life would ebb away, but I kept up his strength with good port wine, egg-flips with brandy, cream and fresh eggs, Brand's essences, and something every hour. His brain was so strong that the doctors had very hard work to get him under chloroform—it took forty minutes, and two bottles of chloroform; but when he did go off it was perfect, and on coming to, he said, "Well, when is it going to begin?" "It is all over long ago, Captain Burton," said the doctor; but in point of fact I had to keep his attention engaged, as they were just clearing away the blood and all traces of the operation. He was so brave, he smoked a cigar and drank a soda-and-brandy an hour after the operation.

Charley Drake's Death.

It was a curious thing that poor Charley Drake, at the age of twenty-eight, died in Jerusalem on the very day Richard was operated upon. He had caught a severe fever in the malarious valley of the Jordan, living under canvas, in heavy rains. He was only ill three weeks, and had no idea of dying until seven hours before his death. For the first two hours he wept bitterly, and, resigning himself, he constantly said, "Tell my mother I die in the love of Jesus." He talked quite as agnostically as Richard did; but he was a good Protestant at heart, and died a holy death. During the time he was delirious he frequently said to Richard's servant, who remained with him, "Habíb, pitch the tents on Mount Sion; there is such a beautiful place." It was where we had often sat, we three together, and he had said how he should like to be buried there. Richard unfortunately got hold of the letter before I did, and he fell back in a faint with the wound reopened. We had lost a true friend, perhaps a better than we should ever see again, and we felt it bitterly. It was just a year since he left us at Venice.

Travelling for his Health.

Richard began (though he progressed favourably) to get exceedingly nervous; he thought he could never live to leave his room, and to fancy that he could not swallow. I proposed to take him away, and the doctors told me they would be only too glad if it were possible to move him. It was the end of July, so I went up to the rural inn, Opçina, before mentioned, took a ground-floor suite of rooms, ordered a carriage with a bed in it, and an invalid chair for carrying up and down stairs; so when he told me that he thought he should never get away, I told him that he certainly would, for that I meant him to go on the morrow. He said it was impossible, that he never could be conveyed below. However, next morning the men came with the chair, the carriage was at the door, and he said smiling, "Do you know, I am absolutely sweating with funk." Fancy how ill that man of iron must have been, who could travel where and as he had travelled, and yet dreaded going down the stairs for an hour's journey in a carriage; but it was the seventy-ninth day of endurance. I made the men put him gently in the chair, and gave him a glass of port wine. We had a hundred and twenty steps to go down, and I made them pause on every landing while I gave him a stimulant, and then we put him gently in the carriage in a recumbent position on a bed, and telling the man to walk his horses, I sat by him and held his hand. After about a quarter of an hour he said, "I am all right; tell him to drive on." We then drove on, and in an hour reached the inn, where I had men waiting to lift him gently into bed. He said, "I feel as if I had made a journey into Central Africa; but I shall get well now."

In a couple of days he was breakfasting and basking out in the garden, and in twelve days I took him on to Padua, where there was a celebrated old doctor (Pinalli), whom I called in. He stayed an hour and a half, and overhauled Richard thoroughly. He said he should go for five days to Battaglia, and that nature and bicarbonate of soda would do the rest. Then he looked round at me, who had been on duty night and day two months and a half. He said, "As for you, you've got gastric fever, and you will go to Recoaro for four weeks; and you will drink the waters, which are purgative and iron, take the baths, and have complete rest." We drove to Battaglia, which is about seven and a half miles away; our traces broke, and we spent some time mending them with bits of string; but I got him there and conveyed him to bed, and here he bathed and took the waters, which are especially for gout.

We used to drive out every day to Monselice, which is a charming place, or to Arqua, to stay by Petrarch's tomb and see his house. One wonders how he left Rome and Venice to settle in such a wretched little place. He died in a very stuck-up wooden chair, in a little hole about the size of a cupboard. It is frescoed everywhere. The good priest (as his tomb was being repaired) gave me a nail out of his coffin, and a bit of its wood, to keep as a treasure. The priest at Monselice has an amateur collection of curios of every sort; a brave, gentlemanly old man, and very much taken with Richard. From here we went to Mont' Ortoni and to Abano, other baths of the same nature. Thence to Monte Rua to see a monastery of Benedictines, where there is an exquisite view of the Italian plains; and one can see Padua, Vicenza, Venice, and the sea in the distance.

We always drove, and where we could not drive I had Richard carried on a chair on two poles everywhere, and I remember so well his saying, "I have always been afraid of being paralyzed, but I do not care in the least now, because I see that I could go about just the same." We returned to Battaglia, and went to a theatre in the evening that was just like a hole in some stables, and everything was to match. It was done, and well done, by the dilettanti of Padua (Torquato Tasso). We then went on to Vicenza. The hotel was rather like Noah's Ark, but it was not uncomfortable. It was now much cooler weather. We arrived at Palezetta, Montecchio, Cornedo with its four churches, and then we drove up a mountain ascent to Recoaro.

The cure here is chiefly a sitz-bath of Fonte Reggia water once a day, from one to three litres of Acqua Amára (bitter water) to drink per diem, a douche for the eyes twice, a douche for the back once, and cold compress at night. We had a charming drive to Valdagno; there are caves, mines, and petroleum there. Other excursions are Monte Guiliane, Fonte Vegri, Fonte Aqua di Capitello, Forano, Rovegliano, where there is a miraculous Virgin, Val d'Agno, Castagnara, Peserico, Spaccata, L'Aura, and Nogara; but the grandest of all is to the peak called the Spitz. We went all these excursions in country carts or on donkeys, for Richard was getting quite strong, and the country is exceedingly beautiful and mountainous. From the Spitz there is a magnificent view of the whole country, but we were eleven hours out.

For those who want to go to Recoaro from the main line between Milan and Venice, Tavernelle is the proper place. It is three hours' drive from Tavernelle to Recoaro. On our return to Vicenza we went to see Monte Berice. At Verona we stayed to see the amphitheatre, the church of Zanone, the tombs of the Scaligers, the gardens of the Conte Giusti, the Duomo, the tomb of Romeo and Juliet, the museum, Roland the Brave's statue, the Palazzo dei Consiglii, the Arco dei Borsari. We began early to explore Vicenza, the Palazzo della Ragione by Pallagio, the great architect of Vicenza, the Palazzo Prefettizio, the Cathedral, and the church of the Corona (where is the best Baptism in Jordan I have ever seen), by Giovanni Bellini. There are two styles of architecture—Venetian semi-Gothic, the Pallagio school, classical. We visited the house of Pigafetta, as well as the house of Pallagio; this gem, which has been most beautiful, is now neglected and forgotten. He was a great navigator, and was one of the companions of Magellan. So much for posthumous fame. The Theatre Olimpico is one of the oldest and most interesting specimens of Pallagio. Here the Academicians used to act the old Greek and Latin plays about 1580. We stopped at Padua to see the doctor again, who found us both perfectly well; got on to Venice and back to Trieste in a shocking bad steamer.

The Nile on the Tapis again.

Meantime the following letter about the Nile appeared from Mr. Findlay (Athenæum, March 21, 1874, No. 2421):—

"The Source of the Nile.

"Dulwich Wood, March 18, 1874.

"It is somewhat remarkable that each accession to our knowledge of Lake Tanganyika has added to the difficulties of the Nile problem; for while oral testimony almost universally points towards its connection with that great river, yet the two occasions on which its northern end was examined would seem, at first sight, to negative such a solution. There are many other evidences in favour of its having a northern outlet, in addition to those which have been well adduced by Mr. Mott, in the Athenæum of March 14th, and those in my letter which you inserted in the Athenæum of February 28th.

"Mr. Stanley's account of the puny and insignificant streamlet which he was told was the Rusizi river, shows that it cannot be taken to have any weight whatever on the solution of the great enigma. The journey he describes has overturned the basis of Captain Speke's theory of the existence of lunar mountains. He does not say one word about the existence of the eleven great rivers which Captain Speke was told fell into the northern head of Tanganyika, therefrom inferring that they rose in an extensive and lofty mountain chain which entirely separated the Tanganyika lake from the Nile basin.

"Captain Speke, in his account of the share he took in the Burton-Speke expedition,[3] gives a most explicit account of an outward flow at the north end of the lake, from the statement of Sheikh Hamed, a respectable Arab merchant, one of a class whose trustworthy testimony was proved by the way in which Captain Burton was enabled to lay down on their map the outlines of rivers and countries they could not visit in their expedition of 1856-58. Sheikh Hamed, after an accurate description of Lake Tanganyika and the rivers which flow into it, says, 'On a visit to the northern end, I saw one which was very much larger than either of these (the Marungu and the Malagarázi), and which I am certain flowed out of the lake; for although I did not venture on it ... I went so near its outlet that I could see and feel the outward drift of the water.' This is in exact accordance with the observations of Dr. Livingstone and Mr. Stanley, quoted heretofore.

"The late venerable Mr. Macqueen published, in 1845,[4] a very circumstantial account of another Arab, Lief ben Saied's visit to the great African lake, of course unknown at that time to Europeans. He says, 'It is well known by all the people there that the river which goes through Egypt takes its origin and source from the lake.'

"These extracts, with many others, have been frequently quoted before in the discussion of the most ancient geographic problem yet left to us, and I will not extend them by any reference to many mediæval speculations, based on the evidently correct and much misunderstood geography of Ptolemy, and but to only one of comparatively modern times, the first announcement from authentic information. It is that given by Pigafetta, among many wild speculations of his own, from the authority of Duarte (or Odoardo) Lopez, in his 'Relatione del Reaine di Congo,' published in 1591. He states that 'there are two lakes, ... situated north and south of each other, in almost a direct line, and about four hundred miles asunder. Some persons in these countries are of opinion that the Nile, after leaving the first lake, hides itself underground, but afterwards rises again.... The Nile truly has its origin in this first lake, which is in 12° south latitude, ... and it runs four hundred miles due north, and enters another very large lake, which is called by the natives a sea, because it is two hundred and twenty miles in extent, and it lies under the equator.'[5] I will not now extend these quotations, but the last-named author, as has been pointed out by Mr. R. H. Major, has indicated the connection between the two lakes on his map as 'Lagoa,' a lagoon or shallow, coinciding exactly with Sir Samuel Baker's information.

"I trust that the expeditions now on foot in Africa will settle this great controversy, and secure for England and the Royal Geographical Society the honour of finally closing the canon of ancient geography, and completing the grand discoveries commenced by Captain Burton in 1857, which has been denied to the greatest explorer that ever existed, Dr. Livingstone.

"But there is one aspect of the geographic solution which may be thought by many not so desirable as the simple fact of the final determination of a grand geographic problem. It may be demonstrated that Lake Tanganyika and its southern extension, the beautiful Lake Liemba, first seen by Dr. Livingstone, and its tributaries, reaching to the cold highlands where that great man's earthly career ended, all belong to the basin of the Nile. If it be the determination of the Khedive that Egypt and the Nile basin shall be conterminous, there may be something to deplore on the missionary object of the great traveller's life. The Mohammedan influence, which has been so forcibly dwelt on of late by Sir Samuel Baker, may, in these distant regions, become paramount, and the telegrams of to-day tell us that by great efforts the navigation of the Nile has been opened up to Gondokoro, so that it behoves Europe to make strenuous exertions to prevent the great efforts she has made to open Africa to Western civilization from being turned to her detriment.

"A. G. Findlay."

We now took very much to our life up in the Karso, walking up without servants, and staying part of the week, and taking immense long drives or immense long walks over the country, searching for inscriptions and castellieri, and of the former we generally took squeezes. When we first began this we were occasionally invited out shooting by the family proprietors of the inn; but we never saw anything, after miles of walking over stony country, but an occasional hare, and for our parts, as we were not hungry, we used to fire everywhere excepting at them, and they generally got off. But one day as we were going along we asked, "What are we going to shoot to-day?" and so they said, "Foxes." So we looked very grave, and we said, "But don't you know that it is against the English religion to shoot a fox?" And they said, "No, is it?" and we said, "Yes, we must turn back;" and so they agreed to sacrifice the day's shooting if we would go out with them, and Richard chaffed them, pretending that he thought that Adam and Eve had been turned out of Paradise for shooting a fox. (We had just seen it in Punch, where two little children had just been wondering why Adam and Eve were turned out of Paradise, and the boy, the son of a sporting parson, said, "Perhaps he shot a fox!")

On Sunday, the 15th of November, we lost some friends. Captain Nevill and his wife, née Lever, sailed for India, having had an offer to command the Nizam's troops in Hyderabad (Deccan), where they have now been eighteen years, and have risen to a great position there. I had now (November 20th) finished writing my "Inner Life of Syria," 2 vols., which occupied me sixteen months, and on Christmas Eve handed my manuscripts over to the publisher. It came round to end of 1874.

This month Richard went to have some teeth out by gas, but the gas did not have any effect on him at all. Believing that they were playing a trick, and that there was no gas in it, it was tried on me, and I went off directly.

My Arab Girl goes Home to be married.

Richard now proposed a thing which disconcerted me considerably, and that was to send me to England to transact some business for him, and to bring out books, and I was to start with several pages of directions, and he would join me later on. I had only been two years in Trieste, and it made me exceedingly miserable; but whenever he put his foot down, I had to do it, whether I would or no. I was getting very unhappy about my poor little Arab maid; she had been very much petted and spoiled; she was getting quite beyond my orders, and would only do what she fancied. It was not easy to marry her in Europe, so that I felt her life would be thrown away. I therefore wrote to her father, to tell him that we proposed to send her home under the charge of the captain and the stewardess of the first ship direct to Beyrout, and that he should meet her, and that he should try and marry her to some of her own people if possible. I told her she had often reproached me with not being able to give her a holiday; that England had disagreed with her so much before, I was afraid to take her back, and that she had better profit of my visit to England to go and see her parents. She liked very much the idea of going to show all her fine clothes and pretty things, and a good sum of money I had saved for her, and she started off with nine boxes full, and a purse full of gold, and before long I heard to my great relief that she had married one of her own people, and was settled down in the Buká'a. It was nevertheless a great wrench to part with her, and we always keep up our affection and correspond in broken Arabic and broken English.

On the 4th of December I put her on board, and I left on the 8th, and never stopped till I reached Paris, and next day went on to Boulogne, arriving in London on the 12th. At Dijon a little Frenchman, hearing me speak German to my maid, accused me of insulting his sister and throwing down her shawl, collected a crowd, had my little dog taken from me and put into the dog-box, although I had taken a ticket to hold it on my knees. I vainly explained that I had never seen either the sister or the shawl, so that I could not have insulted them; and I was very meek, because I was alone. When he found out I was an Englishwoman, he almost cried with vexation for what he had done. In England I was to study up the Iceland sulphur mine affair with Mr. L——, and then to see an immense lot of publishers for Richard. My work was pretty well cut out for me, and I got so wrapped up in it, that sometimes I worked for thirteen hours a day, and would forget to eat. They would come and put a tray by my side with something on it, and I can remember once, after working for thirteen hours, feeling my head whirling, and being quite alarmed, and then I suddenly remembered that I had forgotten to eat anything all day, which I at once did, and recovered.

During the two years we had been at Trieste Richard had occupied himself with writing the "Lands of the Cazembe,"[6] and a small pamphlet of supplementary papers for the Royal Geographical Society, 1873; the "Captivity of Hans Stadt," for the Hakluyt, 1874; articles on "Rome" (two papers, Macmillan's Magazine, 1874-5); the poem of "Uruguay," which has never been published; and "Volcanic Eruptions of Iceland" for the Royal Society of Edinburgh; the "Castellieri of Istria," Anthropological Society, 1874; a "New System of Sword Exercise," a manual, 1875; "Ultima Thule;" "A Summer in Iceland" (2 vols., 1875), which though written had not appeared; "Gorilla Land; or, the Cataracts of the Congo" (2 vols., 1875). Also we had been to Bologna for the express purpose of exploring all the Etruscan remains, and he had produced two volumes of "Etruscan Bologna;" "The Long Wall of Salona, and the Ruined Cities of Pharia and Gelsa di Lesina," a pamphlet, Anthropological Society, 1875; "The Port of Trieste, Ancient and Modern" (Journal of the Society of Arts, October 29th and November 5th, 1875): and Gerber's "Province of Minas Geraes," translated and annotated by him for the Royal Geographical Society; and a fresh paper for the Anthropological on "Human Remains and other Articles from Iceland." So that my charge was the bringing out of three books, and the "Manual of Sword Exercise." This last, when he arrived, he took himself to his Royal Highness the Duke of Cambridge, who desired him to show him several of the positions of defence he most liked, and a system of manchette, with which he appeared particularly pleased, and Richard returned enchanted with his interview. Richard criticizes the English system of broadsword, which, he says, is the worst in the world. With this pamphlet he has done, for broadsword exercise, what a score of years ago he did for bayonet exercise, and he was confident that the Horse Guards will eventually adopt it. The last revised English edition, by MacLaren, at that time dated half a century before. A thousand writers have been at this subject for three hundred and fifty years, and yet Richard found lots of new things to say about it.

Gordon.

One of our most intimate friends was General Charles Gordon—"Chinese Gordon" of Khartoum sad memory. The likeness between these two men, Richard Burton and Charles Gordon, was immense. The two men stood out in this nineteenth century as a sort of pendant, and the sad fate of both is equal, as far as Government goes. One abandoned and forgotten in the desert, the other in a small foreign seaport; both men equally honoured by their country, and standing on pedestals that will never be thrown down—uncrowned kings both. This difference there was between them—Charles Gordon spoke out all that Richard laboured to conceal. He used to come and sit on our hearthrug before the fire in the long winter evenings, and it was very pleasant to hear them talk. Gordon had the habit of saying, "There are only two men in the world who could do such or such a thing; I am one, and you are the other." After he became Governor of the Soudan, he wrote to my husband as follows:—

"You and I are the only two men fit to govern the Soudan; if one dies, the other will be left. I will keep the Soudan, you take Darfur; and I will give you £5000 a year if you will throw up Trieste."

Richard wrote back:—

"My dear Gordon,

"You and I are too much alike. I could not serve under you, nor you under me. I do not look upon the Soudan as a lasting thing. I have nothing to depend upon but my salary, and I have a wife, and you have not."

I have got all Gordon's and his correspondence, and I will give specimens in the coming work, which I shall call "The Labours and Wisdom of Richard Burton," as in this book there is no room to dilate upon his works for his country, nor to quote letters. The subject is so extensive that it would never be read in one work.

I had the pleasure during this visit to London of making acquaintance with Miss Emily Faithful, and renewing acquaintance with Mrs. Pender Cudlip (Annie Thomas). Miss Faithful took me to Middleton Hall, Islington, where she was going to take the chair on Women's Rights.

I need not say that I did not get much time for amusement, between Richard's proof-sheets and mine, K.C.B. letters, sulphur and saltpetre mines—except in the evening, when I went out a great deal.

On the 1st of March, 1875, there was a paragraph in the Scotsman, speaking of Richard's death, and of me as a widow, which gave me a few very unhappy hours. I telegraphed to Trieste at once, packed and prepared money to start; but I got a telegram as soon as a return could be, saying, "I am eating a very good dinner at table d'hôte."

Winwood Reade's Death.

During all the month of April I was very sad about Winwood Reade, who was living, or rather dying, alone in a wretched little room at the top of a house. I used to go and see him every day and try and cheer him, and take him anything I fancied he could touch. I asked him if money could be of any use to him, but he told me he had quite enough to last him for the time he had to live. What distressed me the most of all, was the state he was dying in, which to me was dreadful, because he said he had no belief, and it seemed true. Of course it was useless—it was no business of mine; but I could not help doing my best during the last fortnight of his life to induce him to believe in God, and to be sorry before he died. Three or four days before he died, Mr. and Mrs. Sandwith, who were very old friends of his, removed him to their place, "The Old House, Wimbledon," where he passed away quietly on the 24th of April, 1875. He had caught a cold sitting up at night to write his last book, and had accomplished it in six weeks, but the cold settled on his chest. R.I.P.

On the 5th of May I went to the Drawing-room, and on the 12th of May Richard arrived himself, and we did a great deal of visiting and a great deal of Society in the evening.

This year Richard established his "Divans." They were to be every other Sunday—only men. They were to drop in after dinner, or opera, or club. We were ready at half-past nine. We had mild refreshments, brandies and sodas, various drinks, smoking and talk, and he made me preside, but he would not allow me to invite other women; he said it would spoil the Divan character of the thing. Our first was on the 23rd of May.

This year, 1875, Richard took it into his head to make his fortune by producing a Bitter, the secret of which he had learnt in the East; it was to be put into a pretty bottle, and to have his picture on it. We took a great deal of trouble about it; it was to be called "Captain Burton's Tonic Bitters." It was compounded by a Swedish physician in 1565. He had been hospitably received in a Franciscan monastery, and having nothing to reward them with, before his death, he gave it as a token of gratitude to the Prior. It was extensively used by the monks as a restorative and nervous stimulant during three centuries, and the prescription was given to Richard by his Franciscan friend Padre Francesco. One tablespoonful was to be given in a glass of water or sherry, or diluted cognac. I have got the recipe now. Many people have made a fortune with less, but we were not knowing money-makers. It was supposed to digest and stimulate, and completely took away the consequences of drinking overnight. I am now starting it again with the same chemist with whom we intended to drive it in 1875.

One night in May (my book "Inner Life of Syria" had come out in the morning, and being my first independent publication I went to bed quite ill with fright and the agony of a novice, thinking that all the world now knew what I was thinking about everything)—it so happened that I had to go to a party that night whether I liked it or not, but when I saw a famous Editor standing at the top of the stairs I nearly turned round and bolted out of the house, till I saw a kindly smile breaking out all over his face, and his two hands extended to me, and heard warm congratulations on having written "such a book," which made me as happy as if somebody had just given me a fortune. This month Richard went to the Levée.

K.C.B.

Backed by about thirty of his most influential friends and names that carry weight, I did all I could to get Richard made a K.C.B., but it fell through. Lord Clarendon had told me in 1869 that he thought me very unreasonable, and that if he had one to give away, there were many people that he would rather give it to than Richard. I told him I thought that no one had earned it half so well, and that it was awfully unkind; but this is the paper that I circulated through Sir Roderick Murchison in 1869, now in 1875, and again through another source in 1878. I was backed by any amount of influence each time. Also I got them to ask that he should either return to Damascus or be moved to Marocco or Cairo, Tunis or Teheran.

"June 24, 1869.

"Dear Sir Roderick Murchison,

"I have already spoken to you and personally petitioned that you should ask that my husband, Captain Burton, may be made a K.C.B. You desired that I should furnish you with reasons for making such a petition. I do this with pleasure, and they are as follows:—

"He has been in active service of one kind or another—in each distinguishing himself—for twenty-seven years. Any one of these services would have ensured most men some high reward, but he remains, at forty-eight years of age, a simple Consul in her Majesty's service, without so much as a decoration or an honour of any kind.

"It will be objected that a military K.C.B. cannot be made.

"To this I have to reply, that Captain Burton was nineteen years in the Bombay army—the first ten years in active service, serving five of those years in the Scinde Survey on Sir Charles Napier's staff. He joined his regiment when marching upon Mooltan to attack the Sikhs, and only returned home when compelled by a severe attack of ophthalmia—the result of mental and physical over-fatigue.

"In 1853 he published a system of bayonet exercise—which is actually the one adopted at present by the Horse Guards—which was acknowledged by an order on the Treasury for the sum of one shilling.

"In the Crimea he was Chief of the Staff to General Beatson, and was the chief organizer of the Irregular Cavalry, and at the moment of their disbanding had four thousand sabres in perfect training, ready to do anything and go anywhere.

"In 1861 he came under the reduction when the Indian army changed hands, and his whole nineteen years were swept out as if they had never been, without a vestige of pay or pension. For all this a K.C.B. would be a compensation.

"During the times he was not in active military service he was serving his country, humanity, science, and civilization in other ways, by opening up lands hitherto unknown, and trying to do good wherever he went.

"Baker and Grant have been rewarded for one expedition; Speke would have been had he lived; Livingstone will be when he returns; and Captain Burton only is left out in the cold. It is forgotten that he was the first to lead the way—that he, so to speak, opened the oyster, while Baker, Speke, and Grant appear to have taken the pearl; yet every news we get from Livingstone proves that Captain Burton's original theory was the right one, and that his Lake Tanganyika is the true head source of the Nile, for which all the others have been decorated. Again, it must be remembered that each of these men have made one expedition, and got a large reward, whilst Captain Burton has made several, most of which were at the risk of his life; for instance—

"1. Mecca and Medinah.

"2. Somali-land, East Africa (badly wounded, and lost all his effects). Speke second in command.

"3. The Lake Regions of Central Africa (Speke again second in command). The first attempt to discover the Sources of the Nile. Three years absent, twenty-one fevers, temporary paralysis, and total blindness.

"4. California and the Mormon Country.

"For eight years and a half Captain Burton has been in the Consular Service—

"Firstly.—On the West Coast of Africa, which he thoroughly explored, from Bathurst, on the Gambia, down to S. Paulo de Loanda, in Angola, and the Congo river, visiting the cannibal Fans, and discovering many unknown places.

"This included a dangerous mission of three months' visit to the King of Dahomè, where he was sent by the Foreign Office as Commissioner.

"Lastly.—Four years in Brazil, where he has been equally active and useful, both on the coast and the interior, having thoroughly explored his own province, which is larger than France; the Gold and Diamond Mines of Minas Geraes; canoed down the great river S. Francisco, fifteen hundred miles; visited the Argentine Republic, the river La Plata and Paraguay, for the purpose of reporting the state of the war to the Foreign Office; crossed the Andes, amongst the bad Indians, and visited all the Pacific Coast; and this during sick leave.

"It would be idle and useless to enumerate all that Captain Burton has done in these twenty-seven years, but still there is no need to pass over his thorough knowledge of twenty-five languages, and the fact that he has written almost thirty standard works.

"He is now transferred to Damascus, where his friendship with Mohammedans and knowledge of Arabic and Turkish will put him in intimate relations with Arab tribes.

"Inasmuch as certain designing persons, who are known to us, covet the Consulship to which he is appointed, and are not very scrupulous in their means of trying to bring about their wishes by making disagreeable complications for him, it would be a great help to Captain Burton to leave England with the prestige of having received some mark of approval from his country for his past services, and as Sir Samuel Baker is already knighted and made a C.B. for his one expedition, Captain Burton would like to have something higher for his many services, and in the shape of a military distinction for his past unacknowledged military services, that is, a K.C.B.

"I am sure you will consider that, having done almost more than any other six men living, this distinction is fairly earned, and you will, I am certain, as his old friend and one of his earliest patrons, endeavour to obtain it for him.

"I am, dear Sir Roderick, yours most truly,

"Isabel Burton.

"Hewlett's Hotel, 36, Manchester Street, W., London."

In 1878 I added—

"He explored all the unknown parts of Syria, Palestine, and the Holy Land. He saved the poor peasantry of his jurisdiction from the usurers; advanced the just claims of British subjects. He kept the peace when a massacre seemed imminent, and opposed the fanatical persecution directed against the Christians. Damascus was reduced to a Vice-Consulate, and Captain Burton was therefore recalled, and with 'leave' proceeded to explore Iceland.

"Fourthly.—On his return he found himself appointed to Trieste, where he has explored and described prehistoric ruins unknown to the world, and pronounced to be the most interesting on the continent of Europe. He has also added several new literary works to his writings, and other languages in addition to those before mentioned.

"Captain Burton deeply feels this want of appreciation of his services, for it is not only a neglect, it amounts to an imputation upon his career. He is now not only the first opener of the Lake Regions of Central Africa, but the senior African traveller in England. Most men who have done even average duty, military and civil, during thirty-two years, are acknowledged by some form of honour. To what, then, can the public at home and abroad attribute the cold shade thrown over exploits which are known and appreciated throughout Europe? The various geographical societies of the Continent have, it is true, made him an honorary Fellow. But the foreign Governments—for instance, the Italian, which bestowed gold medals and other honours upon Captain Speke and the Rev. Mr. Badger—cannot be expected to lead the way in honouring a man whose services are ignored by his own rulers. He hopes that he may be recommended to her Majesty and her Majesty's Government, for honours no less than those received by Sir Samuel Baker, and which would have been conferred upon the other heroic travellers had they lived to receive them. In one word, he asks to be made a K.C.B."

When the press unanimously took up the cause of his K.C.B.-ship, and complained that the Government did not give him his proper place in official life, he wrote the following:—

"The Press are calling me 'the neglected Englishman,' and I want to express to them the feelings of pride and gratitude with which I have seen the exertions of my brethren of the Press to procure for me a tardy justice. The public is a fountain of honour which amply suffices all my aspirations; it is the more honourable as it will not allow a long career to be ignored for reasons of catechism or creed. With a general voice so loud and so unanimous in my favour, I can amply console myself for the absence of what the world calls 'honours,' which I have long done passing well without; nor should I repine at a fate which I share with England's most memorable men, and most honourable, to go no further than Gordon and Thackeray. It certainly is a sad sight to see perfectly private considerations and petty bias prevail against the claims of public service, and let us only hope for better things in future days."

It has been an oft-told tale, but it is a true one, that Richard went to the Zoological Gardens one Sunday, and he asked for a glass of beer. The girl was going to give it him, when she changed her mind, and then she said, "Now, are you really a bonâ-fide traveller?" "Well," he said, "I think I am." Then she thought he was taking her in, and she would not give it him. The others laughed and told her who he was; still she would not let him have it.

This year we had some expeditions down the Thames. My brothers and sisters had a boat, and we used to go down to Oxford, sleeping at little inns on the river-side at night, and cooking our food on the banks at lunch-time.

Richard and I went down to Oxford to see Professors Vaux, Jowett, Thomas Short, and McLaren, and, as he was fond of doing, to revisit the colleges—his own Trinity, and Magdalen and Oriel—and to go on the river. I note in our journals of this year, 1875, that we often breakfasted twice and lunched twice, that is to say, to fulfil invitations, and one night we had thirteen invitations, and made a bet that we would do them all, beginning by a dinner-party; and we won it by passing the night in the streets, and only staying a quarter of an hour everywhere.

Richard was lounging at a supper-room door of a ball one night, when an impertinent young "masher" walked up to him and said, "Aw—are you one of the waitahs?" So Richard smiled and pulled his long moustache, and said with a quiet drawl, "No—are you? For you look a damned sight more like a waiter than I do, and I was in hopes you were, because I might have got something to drink."[7]

Richard's picture, by Sir Frederick Leighton, was exhibited in the Academy of 1875.

Meeting Mr. Gladstone—Incidents of London Life.

On the 10th of June we had the pleasure of being asked to meet Mr. Gladstone at Lord Houghton's. Very late in the evening Mrs. Gladstone said to me, "I don't know what it is, but I can't get Mr. Gladstone away this evening." And I said to her, "I think I know what it is; he has got hold of my husband, Richard Burton, and they are both so interested one with the other, and have so many points of interest to talk over, that I venture to hope that you will not take him away."

Richard lectured at the Numismatic, the Royal Geographical, the Anthropological, and several other societies, and we were invited to attend on the Sultan of Zanzibar at the Duchess of Sutherland's, mother of the present Duke, and his Crystal Palace party. The members of the Urban Club gave Richard a dinner and welcome on the 15th of June at St. John's Gate, Clerkenwell. We also had a very pleasant dinner at Mr. Edmund Yates', where we met Wilkie Collins and others, and had some very pleasant literary parties at the Brinsley Sheridans', and Mr. Dicey's. At Lady Derby's we were presented to the Queen of Holland. Her Majesty took a great deal of notice of Richard and me at Lady Salisbury's, and at Lady Egerton of Tatton's, and also at Lady Holland's, and expressed a wish to have his last book, which I had the pleasure of leaving with her secretary.

There was a great Licensed Victuallers' dinner at which two thousand were present, Alfred Bates Richards, who was editor of their paper, the Morning Advertiser, and Richard's great friend, being the President. Richard was a guest, and was asked to make a speech.

Richard had, amongst others, a very remarkable friend; his popular name was "Bob Campbell;" numbers of men knew him well. He was very gentlemanly, very clever, poor, proud, eccentric. He knew Paris as well as London. Richard and he had a very sincere friendship for each other. He lived in an attic, and the second room was a kitchen. He once took it into his head that it was very silly to have to go to the expense of a coffin and not to utilize it during his life, so he went and had himself measured for one, and ordered quite a nice oak and brass, and a plate with his name and everything usual on it, leaving a space for the date, only he had it fitted up inside with crossway shelves, so as to utilize it for keeping cold meat, or bottles, or any other sort of thing. He then told the undertaker to send it on a hearse covered up in the usual way, mutes and all. When it arrived, the landlord ran up in a dreadful state and said, "Sir, what is to be done? there are two mutes at the door with handkerchiefs up to their eyes, and they say the coffin is for one Mr. Robert Campbell. I told them you were not dead, but they say there is no mistake; it is for here, and they won't go away." So Bob Campbell, who had previously arranged the whole scene with the men, went down and told them to bring the coffin up, and put his own handkerchief up to his eyes, saying, "This is a very melancholy occasion indeed; pray bring the coffin upstairs." So it was brought up and set like a little cupboard against the wall, and he gave the mutes something to drink and paid them, and they went away, but the landlord could not get over it at all.

This same Bob Campbell gave delightful little literary suppers, to which we used to go. He used to put on a white-paper cap and white apron, and disappear to do the cooking himself. He used to make a most beautiful bouille-a-baisse, which he would bring in, in a valuable large china bowl, and ladle it out to us, and it was so good we wanted nothing else for supper. Then he would mix his "cup" or his punch (in another exquisite china bowl), and ladle it out with china cups. He used to say, "Now, you must fancy yourself in the Quartier Latin in Paris;" and they tell me it was just like the description. We went twice that summer to him, and the company was so amusing that we stayed till six, and came in with the milk. One morning we had breakfast with Sir Frederick Leighton, and we had our last Sunday's Divan. We went to the Princess of Wales's Chiswick party, and the same night Richard started off for another trip to Iceland.

Excursions.

I was now left alone for a few weeks, and as I had twenty-two country-house invitations, I made a sort of flying rush around, staying about twenty-four hours at each. Amongst others, I went to see the Duke and Duchess of Somerset at Bulstrode, Lady Tichborne, now Mrs. Wickham, and Madame von Bülow at Reigate, then wife, now widow of the then Danish Minister, with whom I formed a friendship which lasts till now, and I hope will always last.

Richard was not gone more than six weeks, and then he returned with an attack of lumbago, followed by gout.

He went off again as soon as he got better. He went by ship to Rouen. He wished to go to Tours to revisit the old home of his childhood, and from thence to Vichy to do some good to the gout, and from there to make a pilgrimage, all by himself, to Paray le Monial, from whence he brought me beads and medals, and arrived in London on October 6th.

More London Life.

This autumn we had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of Mr. Henry Irving, and we saw a great deal of him, and were very constant visitors at Macbeth, which was just out.

I notice some of the most pleasant dinners at the latter part of our stay in England were one at Mr. Dicey's, at George Augustus Sala's, Mr. Whyte-Cooper's, in Berkeley Square, where we met Professor (the late Sir Richard) Owen, and Mr. Frank Buckland, and other delightful people. There was a meeting at the Geographical, where also were Sir Samuel Baker and Colonel Grant. Richard and I gave a little supper afterwards, at which I remember, amongst others, were Mr. Henry Irving, Mr. Val Bromley the handsome artist, the before-named Bob Campbell, Swinburne, Mr. Theodore Watts, and Sir Frederick Leighton. Early in this year I had a visit from Laurence Oliphant, and we had a long conversation about his spiritual views and the part he had taken in Richard's affairs, for which he was sorry.

Leave England.

On the 4th of December Richard notes a never-to-be-forgotten day—so dark, foggy, deep snow, and a red, lurid light. All the gas and candles had to be lit at nine o'clock in the morning. London was like a Dante's snow hell; the squares were like a Christmas tree. It was as dark as if some great national crime was being committed. A large family party accompanied us to the Pavilion at Folkestone to see us off, and there Carlo Pellegrini joined us. He was staying there for his health, and painting a little. Andrew Wilson, of the "Abode of Snow," also joined us, and travelled with us for a week. The snow was eight feet deep. We were joined by several surrounding relations, living at short distances from there. The Dover train stuck in the snow from six till twelve at night. The boat did not cross; the night train did not come in. It was blowing great guns at sea. On the 7th it was something better, and two sledges took us to the station. We landed with great difficulty on the French side. We always lingered at Boulogne whenever we got there. We used to go and see Constantin (Richard's old fencing-master), all the old haunts, the Ramparts where we first met. Caroline, the Queen of the Poissardes, who received us à bras ouverts, talked of old times when we were young people, and reminded me of a promise which was then very unlikely, that if ever I should go to Jerusalem I should bring her a rosary, and I was now able to fulfil it. We went on to Paris. We did not care for Rossi's Hamlet, after Mr. Henry Irving's in London and Salvini's in Italy. I never can see any smartness in a Paris theatre; the scenery is so bad, the dresses so flashy and tinsel, no appliances for effect. I suppose in old days it was different, as so many people raved about it. The acting and the wit I can appreciate. We left Paris on the 16th, to my great delight—I believe I am the only woman who hates Paris—and dined next night at Turin with Cristoforo Negri and family, the head of the Geographical Society of Italy, and Signor Cora and wife, the editor of the most influential paper; and then we went on to Milan, where we always begin to consider ourselves at home on our own ground.

Mr. Kelly, who was then Consul, always made our stay pleasant as long as he was there, and we had delightful purely Milanese dinners together at the Rebecchino. I never pass Milan, and for those who do not know Milan well, I may say that I advise them never to go through without seeing Leonardo da Vinci's "Last Supper" in the refectory of Nostra Signora delle Grazie; then in the Brera, Raphael's "Marriage of the Virgin," with the rejected suitor breaking his rod; the tower of Azoni Visconti, where Jain Maria Visconti was murdered; Saint Gothardo, beautiful Lombard architecture, the façade of the Hospital in terra cotta, so beautifully carved, and the cloistered court; then San Bernardino dei Morti, a curious little church whose whole interior is made of bones and skulls. Every one should go up to the top of Milan Cathedral, which is a garden of spires and pinnacles and statues like lace-work, and of faces of which no two are alike. The view is glorious, and the mountains of Lecco are capped with snow and rosy in the sun.

We arrived in Venice on a dark, sad, silent night, when the plash of the gondola has a sad music of its own. At this time the Montalbas—the whole family are clever, and Clara, whose Venetian paintings are so celebrated, is the best known—were in Venice. These two girls hired a kitchen in their early days, turned it into a studio, and thus gave birth to their now famous works. We got to our home at Trieste on Christmas Eve, and having accepted a Christmas dinner, gave all the servants leave to go out and see their friends; but Richard got seedy on Christmas Day and he went to bed. I had nothing in the house but bread and olives, and ate my Christmas dinner by his bed. How happy we were! What would I give for bread and olives now, and to sit by him again!

[1] To go by sea from England to Trieste occupies from twenty-one to twenty-six days. To go by rail, if you never stop, was in those days a matter of sixty-three hours.

[2] N.B.—This was changed in 1883. They lived for the last eight years in a palazzonè in a large garden, on a wooded eminence standing out to sea, and had four such splendid views on each side, that they said that "if they were in England there would be express trains to see them."—I. B.

[3] Blackwood's Magazine, September, 1859, p. 352.

[4] "See Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, vol. xv. pp. 361-374."

[5] "Pigafetta, edition 1591, p. 80."

[6] "Lacerda's Journey to Cazembe in 1798," Richard translated and annotated, and "The Journey of the Pombeiros," by P. J. Baptista and Amaro Jaso, "Across Africa from Angola to Tette on the Zambesi," translated by B. A. Beadle, and a résumé of the "Journey of MM. Monteiro and Gamitto," by Dr. C. T. Beke, published by the R.G.S. (London, John Murray, 1873).

[7] A good pendant to this is Mr. Gilbert, to whom an aggressive masher said, "Aw—call me a four—wheelah." "Call you a four-wheelah? Of course, I will call you a 'four-wheelah' if you wish. I would call you 'a hansom' if I could."

[CHAPTER II.]

INDIA.

We embarked at once for India. Baron D'Alber, my husband's best friend, the local Minister of Finance in Trieste, and the Captain of the Port, came in the Government boat to take us to the Austrian-Lloyd's Calypso, Captain Bogójevich. H.R.H. the Duke of Wurtemburg, who was our Commander-in-Chief, so distinguished in the Bosnian campaign; Baron Pascotini, a kind, clever, philanthropic old gentleman of eighty-four, and all the great people, came to see us off, to do honour to Richard. How touched we were at so much kindness! We steamed down the Adriatic with a fresh breeze. The day after, Richard began to dictate to me the biography which forms the beginning of this book. We read the life of Moore and the "Veiled Prophet of Khorassán," called by Moore Mokanna, whose real name was Hassan-Sabah, or Hassan es Sayyah. When we got to Zante it blew very hard. Our chairs were lashed on deck, and we read daily "Lalla Rookh," the "Light of the Haram," and Smollett's "Adventures of Roderick Random" and "Memoirs of a Lady of Quality." At Port Sáid, which is a sort of an Egyptian Wapping, we ran over the sands to see an Arab village. We met a lot of old friends, Consul and Mrs. Perceval, Mr. Buckley, F.O., Colonel Stoker, Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Cave, and the grand old Baron de Lesseps, and Salih Beg, Mr. Royal, Mr. Webster, Mr. Fowler, and other gentlemen at dinner at the Consulate. We much enjoyed the Canal, seeing once more an Eastern sunrise over the desert, but it made us sad contrasting our old days with our present. We had a glorious moonlight, blue sky, clear green water, cool balmy air, golden sands to the very horizon, troops of Bedawi camels and goats. It is a wild and dangerous track.

We had the north-east monsoon dead against us the whole way after going out of the Canal, which made the ship pretty lively. In the Red Sea there is much to be seen for those who know the coasts, and my husband pointed out the far-off sites of his old Meccan journey, and the land of Midian and Akabeh, which would be a future journey. On the thirteenth day we serpentined through twenty miles of mostly hidden reefs and slabs to Jeddah, the Port of Mecca, which can only be done in broad daylight, one ship at a time, and no lighthouses. We collided with an English ironclad ship, which did us considerable damage, so we had to remain some time, before we were repaired, and our pilgrims continued to arrive from Mecca, as we were a pilgrim-ship about to carry eight or nine hundred to Bombay.

To the far east we had a gladdening glimpse of the desert, the wild waterless wilderness of Sur on the Asiatic side, which looks like snow under the moonlight. I have not enjoyed myself so much with Nature for four and a half years as now, once more smelling the desert air and the usual Eastern scenes. The Nizam (regular soldiers), negroes, Bedawi draped in usual cloak and kuffíyeh, and women in blue garments, not changed a hair since the days of Abraham, except that they now carry matchlocks instead of spears; the tawny camels squat upon the ground; the black sheep and goats huddle in knots, vainly attempting to shade their heads from the sun; the seedy dahabíyyeh rolls past, and is hustled aside by the fussy high-pressure mouche, which carries the mails daily to Ismailiyyah, a pretty mushroom town with palaces, Consulates and gardens, with telegraph and railway. It contained then two thousand souls, and hoisted nine various national flags. The land of Goshen is immediately north-west. There are plenty of foxes on the Asiatic side, and one sat like a dog on the sandbank and stared at us. We passed the village called Serapeum, which communicates with a Bedawi village in Asia. To the south and westward rise the sandy cliffs of Jebel Jeneffeh, and towering above all, Jebel Atakeh. As we got near Suez, the children run along, crying, "Bakshish!" The soldiers threw them a bit of bread, but as we threw them nothing the petition changed to the curses with which the Orientals are so familiar, "Na'al Abukum ya Kilab!" ("Drat your fathers, O ye dogs!")

At Suez, if you leave your ship—and it is only going to anchor for a few hours in the bay, an hour's steam from the town, and much more by sail—there is a great danger, if a contrary wind springs up, that you are not able to join it. From being a town of importance, Suez was ruined by the opening of the Canal. She has become a big village of three thousand natives, and about seventy-five Europeans, employed in telegraph, post-office, steamers, and railways. She sits solitary under the sky in the sand on the borders of the sea, far from all civilization or progress. She has had a past, and Richard says she will have a future. The troops were then collecting at Masáwwah; three thousand camels were being shipped. One would think that this regular wall of Asiatic mountain, now painted pink and plum blue by the last flood of sunlight, which begins far north of the Lebanon, and which extends southwards to Aden, a counterpart of the Moab range, would have served Holman Hunt for a background to his famous "Scape-goat." Richard knew all this ground twenty-five years before, and he showed me where the Israelites are supposed to have crossed the Red Sea, and where they did cross. Christians have three places, and the Arabs two.

The Red Sea to starboard, where Africa rises wild and grim, is a dangerous shore, requiring lighthouses, which it has not. The morning after, we could see Mount Sinai lone in the Tih Desert. In my husband's Arab days, he landed at Tur, and bathed at Hammam Musa on his way to Mecca. On the other side is the Gulf of Akabah the stormy, and Richard at this time (1876) was brewing his project of the Midian mines, whose gold he had discovered twenty-five years before. He then pointed out to me Yambu, the Port of Medinah, where he was in his pilgrimage, and the winding valleys that lead to it, and Richard asked the pilot about Sa'ad, the Shaykh of the Harb Bedawi, the robber-chief of the Jebel el Fikrah, who attacked Richard's caravan going to Mecca, and he replied that "that dog has since gone to Jehannum."

Jeddah.

Jeddah is the most lovely town I have ever seen, and by moonlight quite ghostly. It looks like an ancient model carved in old ivory. It was here my husband came by land from Mecca, after the pilgrimage, and embarked in 1853. Mecca lies in a valley between those high mountains at the back. Mr. Gustavus Wylde, the Vice-Consul, the son of our old friend Mr. Henry Wylde, of the F.O., sent a boat and a kawwás to bring us off, and insisted on our remaining, the eight days that we were to anchor there, at the Consulate, which we gladly accepted, and I think it was the pleasantest eight days I ever remember. It was a bachelor house, consisting of five men. The Consulate was made of white coralline, with brown wood shutters; jalousies and balconies of fanciful shape, mostly all crooked, but as finely carved as delicate lace. There was a room at the top, a sort of belvedere with windows opening to all sides with delicious views, which I called "The Eagle's Nest," and everything was a combination of Eastern and European comfort. They always mounted us, and we used to ride out into the desert by the Hajj way. It was very tantalizing to find one's self so near Mecca—on one occasion about twenty-five miles—and to have to turn round and come back; but two Americans and two English had gone up for a lark, and had got into trouble. Richard could have gone, but it was not exactly the time to show my blue eyes and broken Arabic upon holy ground, so we returned through the Meccan Gate and the bazars, which are half-dark and half-lit.

Bazars of Jeddah.

The population, except at the Hajj time, including the eleven villages in the plain, is estimated at eighteen, at twenty, at forty thousand. There were only ten resident Christians—European officials or merchants—no ladies. Three of these are Consuls—France, England, and Netherlands. I need not say that we saw everything in Jeddah, and all around it, except Mecca. To have taken these rides, to have walked through the Mecca Gate, to have wandered about the bazars in 1853, when my husband went to Mecca, would have cost us our lives. I cannot tell how I enjoyed the bazars; they are larger and cleaner than Damascus, but I think less rich, and even less picturesque, and my description of the Hajj of Damascus in my "Inner Life of Syria" would do equally well for both. They swarm with a picturesque and variegated mob from all parts of the world; every Eastern Moslem under the sun is represented. There are camels, donkeys, takhtarawán (litters), pilgrims, and Bedawi in quantities, but very few horses. We felt happy in this atmosphere, and the Arabic sounds so musical and so familiar. Here is the open-air mosque where the prayers of the Ramazan are recited. Here the pariah dogs are fiercer than in all other quarters. Here are the pits where the lime is burnt, the fuel and charcoal brought in by the Bedawi, the street of wattled matted booths, where meat and provisions are sold; this, side by side with the great bazar, showing the splendour and misery of the East. Tall-capped, long-bearded Persians are selling fine carpets, cutlery, precious stones—chiefly turquoises and gulf-pearls—and choice water-pipes. Those from Yemen are offering weapons studded with the gold coins of the Venetian Republic, Yemen guns, perfumed coffee, delicate filagree work, and chiselled silver. The pale-faced Turk, in his tarbush and furs in spite of the heat, contemptuously offers arms, jewellery, rugs, and perfumes. Short, thin, dark Indians in white cotton offer silks, dried goods, spices, drugs, tea, rice, and building timber. The Nizam officer talks in a dark corner to the sooty-faced Zanzibari slave-dealer, to settle the terms of some fair purchase. The vulturine Takruri from Western Inner Africa and the Bengali beggar scowl at each other, and the dervishes are singing to the tambourine, and offering a brass pot for contributions.

Turcomans wearing huge mushroom-like caps of Astrachan wool, Caucasians, Central Asians with wadded skull caps, retail to crabbed-faced and spectacled scribes. The tall sinewy Kurd, with gold-threaded kuffíyyeh veiling his dark face, shaven chin, and up-twisted moustachio, is a sheep-dealer and wrangling with the lamb-sellers. The tall, lanky Sawakin Moslem, with sphinx-like curls hanging to his shoulders and over his brow, the upper hair forming a mighty tuft, is selling the mother-o'-pearl fished on the coast. An Egyptian Fellah urges a small, neat horse through the crowd, crying his price—twelve napoleons. The savage Somali offers little parcels of gums, incense, and myrrh, the produce of the wild hills.

Strings of camels, from the high-bred delúl to the diminutive charity-made beast laden with grain and led by an equally miserable Bedawin, who dresses in a long blouse stained yellow with saffron or acacia bark, and kerchief bound to the head with ropes. They all wear the jambíyeh (dagger), either long and straight or short and curved. They carry the crooked stick of the wilderness and the dwarf spear with tapering head. Skeleton donkeys, holed with many a raw, and laden with water-skins, are cruelly driven along by a peasant lad in blue rags; but through the whole crowd we can detect our Shámis, or Damascenes, by the animal of better breed, ridden well by a huge Haji, whose peculiar aba, or cloak, proclaims him to be an Abu Shám, or father of Syria.

There is the surly, rough Slav Turk from Europe, in the Slav garb, swaggering, with his belt full of weapons, past the natty sneering Hejazi, who testily mutters "Ghásim" (Johnny Raw). This dandy affects tender colours—a white turban bound round an embroidered surah cap, a cashmere shawl, a caftan of fine pink cloth, a green worked waistcoat of silk and cotton, a silver-hilted dagger, and elaborately embroidered slippers. There is the pauper Javanese with his pock-marked face, Chinese features, and crooked-bladed Malay dagger; the Jedáwi, selling at auction white soft coral, the produce of the Red Sea, bought by pilgrims in memoriam of their pilgrimage, and black coral-like bog oak, found in thirteen fathoms of water some way down the coast. And lastly brushed by us four brawny Hayramis, the hammals, or porters, of these regions—men even stouter and stronger than the far-famed Armenian porters of Constantinople, who carry a lean corpse, whose toes are tied together; and close by us are seven little negroes with oil-black skins, dressed in snowy sheets, who cast yearning looks at us, for they are for sale.

The bazar at this moment is a panorama of Eastern life, whose costumes, various types, difference of language, manners, and customs form a veritable kaleidoscope. The dry heat of the tropical sun darting through the plank joints, makes the pleasant "coolth" of the coffee-houses and the bubble of the water-pipes refreshing. Every rug and perfume of the Orient, of pipe and kitchen, assail the nose; the sounds of the grunt of the camel, the howl of the trampled dog, the chaff of the boys, the chant of the fakir, the blare of the trumpets, the roll of the drum, the blessing, the curse, the shrill cry, the hoarse expostulation, the babel of tongues, distant voices like the hum of insects on a drowsy summer noon. Every one is armed to the teeth, but no one ever draws a weapon.

At sunset the crowd melts away. The bazar when they light up at dusk is wonderfully picturesque; then the wealthy pilgrim retires to his caravansarai, the middle class to their tents, the majority to their carpets and rugs and coffers, spread in the open street. By eight o'clock the bazar is as silent as the desert, the moon rises, and the prayer cry of the Muezzin charms the ear (this one is peculiar to Jeddah). Richard and I went to the khan, where he lived as one of these very pilgrims in 1853, and stood under the Minaret he sketched in his book, to hear the "call to prayer."

Experiences on a Crowded Pilgrim-ship.

I was very pleased to see that all regarded him with great favour, and though the whole story was known, the Governor and everybody else called upon him and were extremely civil. Nearly every day we rode out Meccawards; it had a great attraction for Richard. The great hospitality shown us, the unbounded kindness of our own countrymen, the courteousness of the Turkish Authorities, and the civility of the fanatical Jeddáwis will never be forgotten. We left in a Sambúk in furious southerly squalls to join our ship, anchored at least six miles away. This is the large, flat native boat, with big sail that can go close to the wind without upsetting. We found eight hundred pilgrims on board, packed like herrings.

There is a long reef near Jeddah, which we just shaved, but another ship that went out at the same time (I will not name it) had taken three hundred pilgrims, and she dashed on to it; the ship foundered, and all hands were lost, except one or two who clung to the spars and were picked up. They affirm that the English captain and officers were drunk, that the fanaticism of the pilgrims was aroused, that they combined and lashed them to the masts, and took charge of the ship themselves. We saw her, and we wondered to see her apparently managing herself, but there were no distress signals up. She ran on to this long bank of rock, upon which breakers foamed higher than a ship. I do not like to cumber my book with an account of the cause or source of the cholera, nor the Jeddah massacre (the same that my husband foretold, was officially snubbed for, which impolite letter he received in the depths of Africa in early 1859, and by the same post the account of the massacre); but I will do so either in the [Appendix] or in a future book—"Labours and Wisdom of Richard Burton."

It is a great experience to have been in a pilgrim-ship, but I am quite content with one experience—they suffered horribly, especially in very wild weather.

On the twenty-seventh day the north-east monsoon actually set in, and destroyed all our peace. The pilgrims howled with fright, and many died; they called "Allahu Akbar" day and night. The ship danced like a cricket-ball. When the storm was at its height Richard was smoking behind a shelter in the bow of the vessel, in the quarters where the sturdiest of our pilgrims had established themselves—Afghans, and all tribes from the north of India, men from Bokhara—when he saw coming amongst them one of two Russian spies we had taken on board at Suez. We had Somalis, Hindis, Arabs from Bokhara, Kokand, Kashgar, Turcomans, Persians, Tashgand (these last Russian subjects), and to those he addressed himself. Richard heard him telling them, in broken Hindustani, that if any accident happened to the ship, that they should aid him to overpower the Austrian captain and officers, and that they and he would cut away the boats and escape, then batten down the remainder of the pilgrims under the hatches, and escape.

As soon as he was gone away, Richard came out to them, and he spoke to each set of men in their own dialect, and he told them that he was an Englishman, and an officer of the Bombay army, and that that man was a Russian spy; and he told them that the Russian had only told them that, in order to get them into trouble when the ship got into Bombay, that they might be looked upon as traitors in the sight of the British Government, and on no account to follow him or his councils. "If anything happened," he said, "everybody will be safely provided for; but I shall follow that man about, and never leave him until the Authorities in Bombay know all about him." The men quieted down at once, and it made the Russian very uneasy to find that they would not listen to him any more. And on arriving at Bombay Richard was as good as his word.

I spent a great deal of my time amongst them, because their misery made me suffer horribly. We lost twenty-three in twenty-three days, not of disease, but of privation, fatigue, hunger, thirst, opium, vermin, and misery. No one would believe it unless they saw the dirt and smelt the horrible effluvia. They have two insatiable wants, and no ship ought to be permitted to carry them unless they will give them a copious supply of fresh good drinking water, and wood to cook with. Many a dying pilgrim embarks without a penny, relying on charity; if there is no charity—which sometimes occurs—the wretch dies. They only want rice, but the ship does not give it, and I have seen a man with three hundred rupees in his belt die of starvation sooner than spend it. They never move out of the small space or position assumed at the beginning of the voyage. The richer ones are all right; the poor are skin and bone, half naked, with a rag round the loins at most. They won't ask, but if they see a kind face they speak with the eyes, as an animal does.

From light till dark, unless writing the biography, we were staggering about our rolling ship with sherbet and food and medicines—we carried no doctor—treating dysentery, fever, diarrhœa; but if I had the misfortune to touch anything, they would not eat it, dying as they were, because they would lose caste. But I made more progress with them than most Europeans, because I could recite the Bismillah in giving it to them. The first funerals made one very serious. I have alluded to them in my "Arabia, Egypt, and India." What struck me was the jolliness with which they were executed—it seemed no more than heaving the lead; but I had never seen a funeral at sea, and I kept saying to myself, "That poor Indian and I might both be lying dead to-day; there would be a little more ceremony for me, and, excepting for my husband, it would cast a gloom over the dinner-table for one day only. The sharks would eat us both, and perhaps like me a little the best, because I am fat and well fed, and do not smell of cocoanut oil. Then we both stand before the throne of God to be judged, he with his poverty, hardships, privations, sufferings, pilgrimage, and harmless life, and I with all my sins, my happy life, my luxuries, and the little wee bit of good I have done, or ever thought to obtain mercy with—only equalled that our Saviour died for both." All are laughing because it is only a poor, ugly old skeleton of a "nigger;" not one of them thinking, "Supposing that were me! My turn will come, and then the rest will think it jolly fun to see me thrown over the side."

Richard at Aden inquired after all his old party in his exploration to Harar. Mohammed el Hammál died only a year ago. Long Guled and the two women, Shehrazade and Deenarzade, are still alive; the former in camp, the latter in Somali-land. Abdo (the End of Time) died a natural death; Yusuf, the monocular one, was murdered by the Isá tribe; Hasan Hammad, the boy, is now sergeant to the water-police. The Egyptians, who took possession of Berberah and Zayla, entered Harar without fighting, and the Amir died under suspicious circumstances. Rauf Pasha is invested on all sides by Gallas and Somali, and is in considerable danger. Hasan procured for us the coins of Harar, which Richard brought to England in 1878.

Aden is a wild and desolate spot, made of fiery rocks. One cannot imagine any one living here; but Richard's old friend, Dr. Steinhaüser, so often mentioned in these pages, lived here for twenty-five years, and dropped down dead in Switzerland. On the thirty-first day I have the following entry:—"A charming day, and no one died. Have seen the prettiest sight possible, late afternoon. Thousands of dolphins playing leap-frog under our bows, and keeping up with the ship." If it had not been for Richard we should have been put into quarantine, through the captain not knowing English, and not being able to explain why he had had twenty-three deaths on board. The yellow flag was already hoisted up; the pilgrims were in despair; but on Richard explaining to the pilot, he pushed off to fetch the doctor, and we were allowed to land, running into Bombay. The last we saw of the holy mob was as a stream of black ants trickling down the ladders and the ropes, hardly able to wait for the boats, and giving us something like a cheer.

Bombay.

Arrived in Bombay, Richard took me to see all the scenes described in the beginning of this book in the early part of his life, and he said, "It is a curious thing, that although I hated them when I was obliged to live here, now that I am not obliged I can look back upon these scenes with a certain amount of affection and interest, although I would not live here again for anything. The old recollection makes me sad and melancholy." We were under very happy auspices there, because Mr. Frederick Foster Arbuthnot, who now lives at 18, Park Lane, had been a friend of Richard's for many, many years, and mine too; he was "Collector" at Bombay, and occupied a great position, so that he used to take us out everywhere in his four-in-hand or in his boats, and we saw everything all over Bombay and its environs, which, though familiar to Richard, was entirely new to me, and we were also introduced to all the Society. The things that I found most interesting were a certain Ali Abdullah, the son of a Syrian Bedawin, of the tribe of Anazeh, who married a Christian, Europeanized himself, settled here, and keeps stables of four or five hundred horses, imports from Persia and elsewhere. We saw some perfect colts, one for £200, and some two hundred kadishi, about fourteen hands high, useful, but not pretty, worth about £12 or £14 in Syria. To the Garapooree Island we went to see the wonderful Hindoo caves, called the Elephant Caves, covered with carvings, cut out of solid blocks, of their Trinity—Shiva, Krishna, and Vishnu. There is something to see all round the Bay.

The Bhendi Bazar is the best sight of all. In its way, it is almost as striking and various as the bazars at Jeddah, so picturesque with its coloured temples, irregular coloured houses, and its wares to sell. There one sees something of native life in its native town. Malabar Hill is very pretty, with its picturesque bungalows and vegetation. Mr. Arbuthnot took us to Bandora, which was to him what Bludán was to us in Syria, or Opçina at Trieste. He had there a charming bungalow and stables by the sea, on Salsette Island, a cool, refreshing, rural, and solitary place. The drive there took us through the bazar, and the beautiful Máhim woods, a cocoa-palm forest, and across an inlet of the sea, which looks like a lake, and divides Bombay from Salsette. On a rising country, with wooded hills and the Ghauts for a background, there is a romantic church, built by the old Portuguese two hundred and fifty years ago, called Nossa Senhora do Monte. It commands a beautiful view, and the water (like a lake in the depression) surrounds it. We always went to Bandora every Saturday to Monday during our stay in Bombay, and always met charming people—the late Duke of Sutherland, Admiral Reginald Macdonald, Admiral Lambert; and Mr. Albert Grey arrived.

Sind.

Now the Sind expedition came off. First, Bassein Dámán, Surat, the first English factory in India, with the tombs of Vaux and Tom Coryat; then Diu, a Head and Fort, Ja'afarábád, the ruins of Somanáth, the home of the famous Gates; the Dwáriká Pagoda, Kachh (Cutch), Mandavi, and the Indus mouths. We called upon the village Chiefs; we chatted with the villagers; we learnt much about the country, and we taught the country something about ourselves. Gujarat was the next place—Káthiawár and Junágarh, better known as Gírnár. And then to Manhóra, where the British arms first showed the vaunting Sindi and the blustering Beloch what the British lion can do when disposed to be carnivorous, and thence to Karáchi town. There we visited every part of the Unhappy Valley, and particularly the Belochis of the hills (with whom Richard had so much to do when under Sir Walter Scott). He writes indignantly about the way Mirza Ali Akbar Kahn Bahadúr was treated by the Government, being removed from the service, and his pension refused in 1847—it is said to annoy Sir Charles Napier, Richard's Chief.

Everywhere he goes (as he recounts in "Sind Revisited," which he wrote from our journal on return) he visits the old scenes of his former life, saluting them, letting the changes sink into his mind, and taking an everlasting farewell of them. He was very apt to do this in places where he had lived. He notices the ruin of the Indian army—the great difference between his time and now. He said, "Were I a woman, I would have sat down and had a good cry." There was only one of his joyous crew still breathing. The buildings had grown magnificent, but everything else had changed for the worse; the old hospitality was gone; there was no more jollity, no more larking boys; everything so painfully respectable, and so degenerated. He went to visit the old alligator tanks, where they used to go and worry them with their bull-terriers, and the boys used to jump on them and ride them. "No such skylarking now," he remarked. Then he waxes sentimental at the place where he had a serious flirtation with a Persian girl. There is the shop where he used to write with phosphorus on the wall. He had three shops in Karáchi, where he appeared in different disguises, and was considered a saint when he was so disguised and appeared in such or such a character. Then we went back to Baroda, where he was quartered so long, and to see the Goanese church, to which he transferred himself in 1843, and to Gharra, where he had to live so miserably. He traces the foundation of the lines of his old regiment, where he says, "None of us died, because we were young and strong; but we led the life of salamanders." He says, "There lies the old village, which saw so many of our 'little games;' a cluster of clay hovels, with its garnishing of dry thorns, as artlessly disposed as the home of the nest-building ape. How little it has changed; how much have we!" He next goes to Nagar (everywhere pronounced Nangar), and to Thathá, and Kalyan Kot, and the Mekli Hills (holy places), where he composed the following poem:—

"LEGEND OF THE LAKKÍ HILLS.
"In awful majesty they stand,
Yon ancient of an earlier earth,
High towering o'er the lowly land
That in their memories had birth;
And spurning from their stony feet
The rebel tides, that rush to beat
And break where rock and water meet.
Hoar their heads and black their brows,
And scarred their ribbèd sides, where ploughs
Old Age his own peculiar mark
Of uneffaceable decay;
And high and haughty, stern and stark,
As monarchs to whose mighty sway,
A hundred nations bow—stand they.
"Within the deep dark cleft of rock dividing,
Two giants taller than their kin,
Whence the sharp blade of piercing torrent gliding,
Here flashes sudden on the sight, there hiding
'Mid stones all voice with crashing din;
Where earthborn shade with skylight blends,
A grot of grisly gloom impends
The source from which the wave descends.

"Upon its horrid mouth, I ween,
The foot of man hath never been;
The foulest bird of prey would shrink
To nestle on that noisome brink.
Now the warm cauldron's sulphury fumes upseething,
As sighs that Stygian pit exhales,
The cavern's pitchy entrance veils,
Then in the wind's cold breath the vapours wreathing,
Dissolve—again the eye defines
The dripping portals' jagged lines.
"A glorious vision from that cave
Glittered before my gazing eye;
A seraph-face, like one that beams
Upon his sight, when blissful dreams
Round holy hermit's pillow fly.
A form of light, as souls that cleave
The darksome dungeon of the grave,
When awful judgment hour is nigh.
And oh, that voice! Can words express
The fulness of its loveliness,
Its rare and wondrous melody?
Ah, no! no mortal tongue may be
So powerful in poesy!
"Might I but gaze upon that brow,
Might I but hear that witching strain,
The joys that all the Seven Climes [1] know,
The charms that all the heavens show,
Were mine—but mine in vain.
"A moment pass'd the sound away,
Faded the vision from my sight;
And all was as it was before—
Vapour and gloom and deaf'ning roar.
Then soft arose that sound again—
Again appeared that form of light
Athwart the blue mist, purely white;
As from the main, at break of day,
Springs high to heaven the silvery spray.
"She beckoneth to me,
And in that smile there is
Promise of love and bliss,
Enduring endlessly.
"Whirled my brain, my heedless foot
Already left the verge
Where the water-spirit pours
His bolts of feathery surge,
Where iron rocks around, beneath,
Stand quick to do the work of death.
When, swift as thought, an icy arm
Against my falling bosom prest;
Its mighty touch dissolved the charm,
As suns disperse the mists that rest
On heathery mountains' dewy crest.

"I heard the angry waters rave,
I saw the horrors of the grave
That yawned to gulf its prey;
And started back in such dismay,
As wretch that, waked from midnight sleep,
Descries through shadows, glooming deep,
The ghost of murdered victim glide,
In gory robes, his couch beside.
I looked towards the darkling cave;
No more the vision glittered there,
No music charmed the echoing air—
That strain so sweet! that face so fair!—
And, but for one shrilly shriek
Of fiendish rage that smote mine ear,
And, but for one horrent thrill
That seemed with ice my veins to thrill;
Well had I deem'd 'twas Fancy's freak,
That scene, whose vivid features lie
On Memory's page typed durably."

Travelling in Sind.

We go to Sundan, to Jarak, to the Phuleli river, where he spent some time in his early days with a moonshee, and make a pilgrimage to the Indus river, and eventually to Hyderabad (Sind) and to Kotri the Fort, where, as he says, for the sake of "auld lang syne," he visits every place to right and left on his way, even the Agency and the old road. He says the changes take away his breath.

The Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton, volume 2 (of 2) / By His Wife, Isabel Burton

THE LIFE OF

CAPTAIN

SIR RICHARD F. BURTON,

K.C.M.G., F.R.G.S.

BY HIS WIFE,

ISABEL BURTON.

WITH NUMEROUS PORTRAITS, ILLUSTRATIONS, AND MAPS.

IN TWO VOLUMES.VOL. II.

LONDON: CHAPMAN & HALL, LD.1893.

CONTENTS.

TRIESTE—HIS FOURTH AND LAST CONSULATE.

INDIA.

THE DECCAN.

A QUIET TIME AT TRIESTE.

SPIRITUALISM.

ON LEAVE IN LONDON.

ON SLAVERY.

TRIESTE LIFE AGAIN.

ANOTHER SHORT LEAVE TO LONDON.

MISCELLANEOUS TRAITS OF CHARACTER AND OPINIONS.

DECLINE IN OUR WELL-BEING.

RICHARD ON HOME RULE AND THE RELIGIOUS QUESTION.

WE LEAVE ENGLAND.

CHANGES.

AT MONTREUX.

WE RETURN HOME FOR THE LAST TIME.

THE TWO CONTESTED POINTS BETWEEN A SMALL SECTION OF ANTAGONISTS AND MYSELF.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

CHAPTER I.

TRIESTE—HIS FOURTH AND LAST CONSULATE.

"CAPTAIN RICHARD F. BURTON AT TRIESTE.

Cicci.

Opçina.

"To the Editor of the Pall Mall Gazette.

"Precaution in fighting the Ashantees.

"The Overflow of the Tiber.

"To the Editor of the Tablet.

"The Tiber.

"To the Editor of the Pall Mall Gazette.

"Captain Burton's Discoveries in Istria.

"(Anthropological Report.)

"The Source of the Nile.

INDIA.

Sind.

IN TWO VOLUMES.
VOL. II.

LONDON: CHAPMAN & HALL, LD.
1893.