Soon after the new year Isabel began to get ill again. She had not
really recovered from her fall in Paris nine months before. The doctors
advised her to see a bone-setter. She wrote and told her husband, who
was then in Egypt, and he replied by telegram ordering her to go home
to London at once. She reached London, and went through a course of
medical treatment. She notes during this dreary period a visit from
Martin Tupper, who came to see her on the subject of cruelty to animals.
(Burton always joked with his wife about "Tupper and the animals.")
He presented her with a copy of his _Proverbial Philosophy_, and also
wrote her the letter which is reproduced here:
"WEST CROYDON, January 17, 1880.
"MY DEAR MADAM,
"I hope you will allow a personal stranger, though haply on both sides
a book friend, to thank you for your very graphic and interesting _A.
E. I._ travels; may the volume truly be to you and yours an everlasting
possession! But the special reason I have at present for troubling you
with my praise is because in to-day's reading of your eleventh chapter I
cannot but feel how one we are in pity and hope for the dear and innocent
lower animals so cruelly treated by their savage monarch, man, everywhere
during this evil aeon of the earth. To prove my sympathy as no new
feeling, I may refer your kindly curiosity to my Proverbial Chapters
on 'The Future of Animals,' to many of my occasional poems, and to the
enclosed, which I hope it may please you to accept.
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