ews," she said, "I am proud to say that I have never in my life
tried to influence my husband to do anything wrong, and I am prouder
still to say that if I had tried I should not have succeeded."

For ten months the Burtons had to endure "great poverty and official
neglect," during which they were reduced to their last L15. Having been
invited by Mrs. Burton's uncle, Lord Gerard, to Garswood, [247] they
went thither by train. Says Mrs. Burton, "We were alone in a railway
compartment, when one of the fifteen sovereigns rolled out of my pursed,
and slid between the boards of the carriage and the door, reducing us to
L14. I sat on the floor and cried, and he sat by me with is arm round my
waist trying to comfort me." [248] The poet, as Keats tells us, "pours
out a balm upon the world," and in this, his darkest hour, Burton
found relief, as he had so often found it, in the pages of his beloved
Camoens. Gradually his spirits revived, and he began to revolve new
schemes. Indeed, he was never the man to sit long in gloom or to wait
listlessly for the movement of fortune's wheel. He preferred to seize it
and turn it to his purpose.

66. An Orgie at Lady Alford's. 2nd November 1871.

If the Burtons lacked money, on the other hand they had wealthy
relations with whom they were able to stay just as long as they pleased;
and, despite their thorny cares, they threw themselves heartily into the
vortex of society. Among their friends was Lady Marion Alford, a woman
of taste, talent and culture. The first authority of the day on art
needlework, she used to expound her ideas on the looms of the world
from those of Circe to those of Mrs. Wheeler of New York. At one of Lady
Alford's parties in her house at Princes Gate, October 1871, the Prince
of Wales and the Duke of Edinburgh being present, Burton appeared
dressed as a Syrian shaykh, and Mrs. Burton as a Moslem lady of
Damascus. Burton was supposed not to understand English, and Mrs. Burton
gave out that she had brought him over to introduce him to English
society. She thus described the occurrence in an unpublished letter to
Miss Stisted. [249]

"Our orgie was great fun. The Bird and I wore Arab dresses. I went in
the dress of an Arab lady of Damascus, but as myself, accompanied by
Khamoor in her village dress and introducing Hadji Abdullah, a Moslem
shaykh of Damascus. We then spoke only Arabic to each other, and the
Bird broken French to the company present. We were twent