eth--the legacy of
twenty-one attacks of fever.

When the question of their marriage was brought before her parents, Mr.
Arundell not only offered no impediment, but remarked: "I do not know
what it is about that man, I cannot get him out of my head. I dream
of him every night," but Mrs. Arundell still refused consent. She
reiterated her statement that whereas the Arundells were staunch old
English Catholics, Burton professed no religion at all, and declared
that his conversation and his books proclaimed him an Agnostic. Nor
is it surprising that she remained obdurate, seeing that the popular
imagination still continued to run riot over his supposed enormities.
The midnight hallucinations of De Quincey seemed to be repeating
themselves in a whole nation. He had committed crimes worthy of the
Borgias. He had done a deed which the ibis and the crocodile trembled
at. Miss Arundell boldly defended him against her mother, though she
admitted afterwards that, circumstances considered, Mrs. Arundell's
opposition was certainly logical.

"As we cannot get your mother's consent," said Burton, "we had better
marry without it."

"No," replied Miss Arundell, "that will not do," nor could any argument
turn her.

"You and your mother have certainly one characteristic in common," was
the comment. "You are as obstinate as mules."

Burton was not without means, for on the death of his father he
inherited some L16,000, but he threw his money about with the
recklessness of an Aladdin, and 16 million would have gone the same way.
It was all, however, or nearly all spent in the service of the
public. Every expedition he made, and every book he published left him
considerably the poorer. So eager for exploration was he that before the
public had the opportunity to read about one expedition, he had started
on another. So swiftly did he write, that before one book had left the
binders, another was on its way to the printers. Systole, diastole,
never ceasing--never even pausing. Miss Arundell being inflexible,
Burton resolved to let the matter remain nine months in abeyance,
and, inactivity being death to him, he then shot off like a rocket to
America. One day in April (1860) Miss Arundell received a brief letter
the tenor of which was as follows:--"I am off to Salt Lake City, and
shall be back in December. Think well over our affair, and if your mind
is then made up we will marry."

Being the first intimation of his departure--for as us