“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[FN#692] where she stayed from September to March 1896, busying herself composing her autobiography.[FN#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[FN#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 case my own idea is that I may be able to last till March.”

184.  Death of Lady Burton, 22nd Mar. 1896.

Lady Burton from that time gradually grew weaker; but death, which “to prepared appetites is nectar,” had for her no terrors.  To her it meant release from pain and suffering, ultimate reception into the presence of an all-merciful God, re-union with her beloved husband.  She did, however, last, as she had anticipated, till March.  Early in that month she returned to Baker Street, where she died rather suddenly on Sunday the 22nd.