ith impatience, at last so far forgot herself as to put her
head out of the window and cry to the driver, "Why don't you beat him?
Why don't you make him go?" [691] She occasionally met her husband's
friends, Mr. and Mrs. Arbuthnot and Mr. Payne. One day at some dinner it
transpired in the course of conversation that Mr. Payne had all his life
been an habitual sufferer from insomnia.

"I can tell you how to cure that," said Lady Burton.

"How?" said Mr. Payne. "Say your prayers," said she.

After an attack of influenza Lady Burton hired a cottage--Holywell
Lodge--at Eastbourne [692] where she stayed from September to March
1896, busying herself composing her autobiography. [693] Two letters
which she wrote to Miss Stisted from Holywell Lodge are of interest.
Both are signed "Your loving Zoo." The first contains kindly references
to Mr. and Mrs. Arbuthnot, who had been visiting her, and to the widow
of Professor Huxley [694] who was staying at Eastbourne; and the
second, which is amusing enough, records her experiences among some very
uncongenial people at Boscombe. Wherever she went, Lady Burton, as we
have seen, was always thrusting her opinions, welcome or not, upon other
persons; but at Boscombe the tables were turned, and she experienced the
same annoyance that she herself had so often excited in others.

"I went," she says, "to a little boarding-house called.... The house
was as comfortable as it could be, the food plain, but eatable, but the
common table was always chock full of Plymouth Brethren and tract-giving
old maids, and we got very tired of it."

Then follows an account of her establishment at Eastbourne. "It
consists," she says, "of my secretary (Miss Plowman) and nurse, and we
have our meals together, and drive out together whenever I am able. Then
my servants are a maid, house-parlour-maid, a housemaid and a cook
(my Baker Street lot). The cottage [at Mortlake] is in charge of a
policeman, and Baker Street a caretaker. My friend left three servants
in the house, so we are ten altogether, and I have already sent one
of mine back, as they have too much to eat, too little to do, and get
quarrelsome and disagreeable." Thus it was the same old story, for
Lady Burton, though she had the knack of living, was quite incapable of
learning, or at any rate of profiting by experience.

The letter concludes sadly, "As to myself, I am so thin and weak that I
cannot help thinking there must be atrophy, and in any