Page:Memoirs of the Lady Hester Stanhope.djvu/233

 who supplied vegetables; the fisherman who sent her choice fish, &c. Two hundred piasters were paid annually to old Jacob, a tailor; fifty here and there to the imàms of particular mosques; as much to the mistress of the bath to which she sent her maids to be washed. Mr. Loustaunau generally had about five hundred piasters a quarter. Of many of her benefactions I never knew anything. Had I kept a list of the sums which, besides these customary donations, she gave to the distressed, few would wonder that she was so beloved and so generally lamented. Thus, when the ferdy and miri, two onerous taxes, fell due, she commonly paid them for such of her servants as were burdened with families, or whose means were scanty: she did the same when unusual contributions were levied, as during the conscription. On the 8th of December, I find a note that I gave fifty piasters and a counterpane to a poor shepherd boy, labouring under anasarca from an indurated spleen, a most common complaint in the country, the effect of protracted agues; and eighty to an old man, who had some years before been her asackjee. To Logmagi mostly fell the distribution of all these sums, and it was only occasionally that I was the almoner to this truly noble and disinterested woman; else I should have been able to have cited more examples.

January 31.—Being Wednesday, it was a rule with