Page:The Romance of Isabel, Lady Burton.djvu/264

232 all round the house. On account of the diplomats occupying this hotel on a special mission from England to give the Garter to the King of Portugal, it was still crowded, and we were put up in the garrets at first. After two days we were given a very pleasant suite of rooms—bedroom, dining- and drawing-room—with wide windows overlooking the Tagus and a great part of Lisbon.

"These quarters were, however, not without drawbacks, for here occurred an incident which gave me a foretaste of the sort of thing I was to expect in Brazil. Our bedroom was a large whitewashed place; there were three holes in the wall, one at the bedside bristling with horns, and these were cockroaches some three inches long. The drawing-room was gorgeous with yellow satin, and the magnificent yellow curtains were sprinkled with these crawling things. The consequence was that I used to stand on a chair and scream. This annoyed Richard very much. 'A nice sort of traveller and companion you are going to make,' he said; 'I suppose you think you look very pretty and interesting standing on that chair and howling at those innocent creatures.' This hurt me so much that, without descending from the chair, I stopped screaming, and made a meditation like St. Simon Stylites on his pillar; and it was, 'That if I was going to live in a country always in contact with these and worse things, though I had a perfect horror of anything black and crawling, it would never do to go on like that.' So I got down, fetched a basin of water and a slipper, and in two hours, by the watch, I had knocked ninety-seven of