You all know how fond I am of Trieste; but it is the very hardest place
I ever worked in, and eleven years of it have pretty nearly broken me up.
Nevertheless I shall always, please God, wherever I am, 'open my mouth
for the dumb,' and adhere to my favourite motto: 'Fais ce que dois,
advienne que pourra.'"
For the first time this summer Isabel and her husband found the swimming
in the sea, which had been one of their favourite recreations at Trieste,
no longer agreed with them, and they came reluctantly to the conclusion
that their swimming must go the way of the fencing, and that the days
of their more active physical exercises were over. For the first time
also in all the twenty-two years of their married life they began to
shirk the early rising, and now no longer got up at 3 or 4 a.m., but
at the comparatively late hour of 6 or 6.30 a.m. In November Burton
had a serious attack of gout, which gave him agonies of pain; and it
was at last borne in upon him that he would have to make up his mind
henceforth to be more or less of an invalid. Simultaneously Isabel
was ill from peritonitis. There seemed to be a curious sympathy
between the two, which extended to all things, even to their physical
health. On December 6 Burton put the following in his diary in red
ink: "_This day eleven years I came here. What a shame!_"
Early in 1884 Isabel came in for a small legacy of 500 pounds sterling,
which was useful to them at the time, as they were far from being well
off, and had incurred many expenses consequent on their change of house.
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