she bullied, she threatened, she
took a hundred other courses--all with one purpose. She was very often
woefully indiscreet, but nobody can withhold admiration for her. Burton
was scarcely a model husband--he was too peremptory and inattentive for
that--but this self-sacrifice and hero worship naturally told on him,
and he became every year more deeply grateful to her. He laughed at her
foibles--he twitted her on her religion and her faulty English, but he
came to value the beauty of her disposition, and the goodness of her
heart even more highly than the graces of her person. All, however, that
his applications, her exertions, and the exertions of her friends
could obtain from the Foreign Secretary (Lord Russell) [186] was the
Consulship of that white man's grave, Fernando Po, with a salary of L700
a year. In other words he was civilly shelved to a place where all his
energies would be required for keeping himself alive. "They want me to
die," said Burton, bitterly, "but I intend to live, just to spite the
devils." It is the old tale, England breeds great men, but grudges them
opportunities for the manifestation of their greatness.

The days that remained before his departure, Burton spent at various
Society gatherings, but the pleasures participated in by him and his
wife were neutralised by a great disaster, namely the loss of all his
Persian and Arabic manuscripts in a fire at Grindley's where they had
been stored. He certainly took his loss philosophically; but he could
never think of the event without a sigh.

Owing to the unwholesomeness of the climate of Fernando Po, Mrs. Burton
was, of course, unable to accompany him. They separated at Liverpool,
24th August 1861. An embrace, "a heart wrench;" and then a wave of the
handkerchief, while "the Blackbird" African steam ship fussed its way
out of the Mersey, having on board the British scape-goat sent away--"by
the hand of a fit man"--one "Captain English"--into the wilderness
of Fernando Po. "Unhappily," commented Burton, "I am not one of those
independents who can say ce n'est que le premier pas qui coute." The
stoic, however, after a fair fight, eventually vanquished the husband.
Still he did not forget his wife; and in his Wanderings in West Africa,
a record of this voyage, there is a very pretty compliment to her which,
however, only the initiated would recognise. After speaking of the
black-haired, black-eyed women of the South of Europe, and giving them
thei