“Dear Mr. Arbuthnot, “Your sympathy and that of Mrs. Arbuthnot is very precious to me and I answer you both in one.  I cannot answer general letters, but you were his best friend.  I should like to tell you all if I saw you but I have no heart to write it. ...  I am arranging all his affairs and when finished I bring him to England. ...  I shall be a little slow coming because I have so much to do with his books and MSS., and secondly because the rent is paid to the 24th February and I am too poor to pay two places.  Here I cannot separate from his body, and there it will be in the earth.  I am so thoroughly stunned that I feel nothing outside, but my heart is crucified.  I have lost all in him.  You will want to know my plans.  When my work is done, say 1st of March, I will go into a long retreat in a convent and will offer myself to a Sister of Charity.  I do not think I shall be accepted for my age and infirmities, but will try. ...  The world is for me a dead letter, and can no more touch me.  No more joy—­ no further sorrow can affect me.  Dr. Baker is so good to me, and is undertaking my affairs himself as I really cannot care about them now.  Love to both.  God bless you both for unvarying friendship and kindness.  Your affectionate and desolate friend, Isabel Burton.

“I have saved his gold watch-chain as a memorial for you.”

So passed from human ken the great, noble and learned Richard Francis Burton, “wader of the seas of knowledge,” “cistern of learning of our globe,” “exalted above his age,” “opener by his books of night and day,” “traveller by ship and foot and horse."[FN#643] No man could have had a fuller life.  Of all travellers he was surely the most enthusiastic.  What had he not seen?  The plains of the Indus, the slopes of the Blue Mountains, the classic cities of Italy, the mephitic swamps of Eastern Africa, the Nilotic cataracts, Brazil, Abeokuta, Iceland, El Dorado—­all knew well—­him, his star-sapphire, and his congested church service:  lands fertile, barren, savage, civilized, utilitarian, dithyrambic.  He had worshipped at Mecca and at Salt Lake City.  He had looked into the face of Memnon, and upon the rocks of Midian, ’graven with an iron pen,’ upon the head waters of the Congo, and the foliate columns of Palmyra; he had traversed the whole length of the Sao Francisco, crossed the Mississippi and the Ganges.  Then, too, had not the Power of the Hills been upon him!  With what eminence indeed was he not familiar, whether Alp, Cameroon or Himalaya!  Nor did he despise the features of his native land.  If he had climbed the easy Andes, he had also conquered, and looked down from the giddy heights of Hampstead.  Because he had grubbed in the Italian Pompeii he did not, on that account, despise the British Uriconium.[FN#644] He ranks with the world’s most intrepid explorers—­with Columbus, Cabot, Marco Polo, Da Gama and Stanley.  Like another famous traveller, he had been “in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in weariness and painfullness.”  In the words of his beloved Camoens, he had done