Warburton, Eliot: Travels in Egypt and the Holy Land, or, The crescent and the cross: comprising the romance and realities of eastern travel (Philadelphia, 1859)

ctap m.] LADY HESTER STANHOPE. 20

" Mr. Moore, our consul at Beyrout, hearing she was ill, rode
over the mountains, to visit her, accompanied by Mr. Thomson,
the American missionary. It was evening when they arrived,
and a profound silence was over all the palace ; no one met them;
they lighted their own lamps in the outer court, and passed un-
questioned through court and gallery, until they came to where
she lay. A corpse was the only inhabitant of the palace, and the
isolation from her kind which she had sought so long was indeed
complete. That morning, thirty-seven servants had watched
every motion of her eye: its spell once darkened by death, every
one fled with such plunder as they could secure. A little girl,
adopted by her and maintained for years, took her watch and
some papers on which she had set peculiar value. Neither the
child nor the property were ever seen again. Not a single thing
was left in the room where she lay dead, except the ornaments
upon her person : no one had ventured to touch these, and even
in death she seemed able to protect herself. At midnight, her
countryman and the missionary carried her out by torchlight to a
spot in the garden that had been formerly her favourite resort,
and there they buried her."