ut whatever he was doing the crush had rendered him helpless.

"Oh dear!" cried the lady, "this horrid man is choking me."

"It's that blackguard of a Burton!" followed the lady's husband.

Burton's eyes flashed and his lips went livid, "I'll have you out for
this," he cried, "and if you won't fight I'll thrash you like a dog."

"That's how you keep your promise," said Mrs. Burton to him, when they
got home. "You don't get half a dozen steps up the staircase before you
have a row with someone." Then he burst out with his "pebble on ice"
laughter.

For Burton to overhear remarks uncomplimentary to himself was no
uncommon occurrence, but he rarely troubled to notice them. Now and
again, however, as the previous anecdote shows, he broke his rule. Once
at a public gathering a lady said, loudly, to a companion, "There is
that infamous Captain Burton, I should like to know that he was down
with some lingering and incurable illness."

Burton turned round, and fixing his eyes upon her, said with gravity:
"Madame, I have never in all my life done anything so wicked as to
express so shocking a wish as that."

The next anecdote shows how dangerous Burton could be to those who
offended him. When the Sultan of Zanzibar was paying a visit to
England, Burton and the Rev. Percy Badger were singled out to act as
interpreters. But Burton had quarrelled with Badger about something or
other; so when they approached the Sultan, Burton began addressing
him, not in Arabic, but in the Zanzibar patois. The Sultan, after some
conversation, turned to Badger, who, poor man, not being conversant with
the patois, could only stand still in the dunce's cap which Burton,
as it were, had clapped on him and look extremely foolish; while the
bystanders nodded to each other and said, "Look at that fellow. He can't
say two words. He's a fraud." Burton revelled in Badger's discomfiture;
but a little later the two men were on good terms again; and when Badger
died he was, of course, Burton's "late lamented friend."

Another of Burton's aversions was "any old woman made up to look very
young." "Good gracious," he said, one day to a painted lady of that
category. "You haven't changed since I saw you forty years ago. You're
like the British flag that has braved a thousand years of the battle and
the breeze." But the lady heaped coals of fire on his head.

"Oh, Captain Burton," she cried, "how could you, with that musical--that
lovely voice of yours--mak