Page:Memoirs of the Lady Hester Stanhope.djvu/335

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Lady Hester Stanhope.
321

adopt his tenets? and so of other passages. The chiefs of their religion cannot make any disclosures; for, if they did, their lives would be the forfeit. Tell him they are a bold, sanguinary race, who will cut a man in pieces themselves, or see it done by others, and never change colour. Why, one of them, not long since, killed or wounded with his own hands five of Ibrahim Pasha's soldiers, who were sent to seize him as a refractory recruit."

Here Lady Hester, having finished making the lemonade, stopped for a moment to desire Zezefôon to take it out and send it to the strangers' room. She then resumed, "Tell them, doctor, that no people will bear a flogging like the Druzes. The Spartans were nothing to them: isn't it the Spartans that were such floggers? for I am such a dunce that I never can recollect some things which every schoolboy knows; and I always said I was a dunce in some things, although Mr. Pitt used to say, 'Hester, if you would but keep your own counsel, nobody could detect it. But it is the truth, and when you talk to me of paper money and the funds (although I may understand for the moment what you try to explain to me), I forget it all the next morning: yet, on subjects which my inclination leads me to investigate, nobody has a better judgment. My father, with all his mathematical knowledge, used to say I could split a hair. Talk to