Page:Memoirs of the Lady Hester Stanhope.djvu/305

 off to Constantinople. "Thus," said Lady Hester, "I saved a young man from destruction. Messâad has now a good place under the Sardinian consul at Beyrout; his eyebrows and mustachios are grown again; he has married, and has a family; and I dare say the Sardinian consul, if he knows anything of the story, thinks not a bit the worse of him."

The above are the words in which Lady Hester, on the 20th of January, 1831, related this singular punishment, inflicted with the best intentions on poor Messâad. One evening, in 1837, when writing a letter to the same Messâad, for certain commissions which he had to execute for her ladyship, who was in the habit of employing him to buy pipes, cloth, and sundry other articles found in the shops at Beyrout, she spoke to me as follows. "You know, doctor, all that affair about Michael and Messâad, and how I had one side of his face shaved. Well, I found out afterwards that what Messâad had said was every bit of it true. I have made it up to him since as well as I could: he does not want abilities, and kept my house in excellent order whilst he was with me."

But this was not the first time Lady Hester had resorted to this singular mode of punishment; some years before, a chastisement for similar frailties, not unlike that which Messâad underwent, as far as regarded the eyebrows, fell to the lot of a peasant girl