The idea of putting Lady Hester in a cage was certainly not ordinary. Happily, Bruce fell ill, and the doctor was despatched to attend and calm him. The road skirted the desert, and, costumed as a Bedouin, with lance on shoulder, Meryon, by way of Yebroud, Kara, Hasia and Homs, reached Hama, where Bruce, already restored to health, soon rejoined him. He brought back with him a young Frenchman of Aleppo, called Beaudin, who spoke Arabic almost as well as a native of the country. Leaving them to continue their journey, the doctor again took the road from Damascus to Yebroud. Then he made a detour to reach the village of Nebk, where a man was living whose acquaintance Lady Hester keenly desired to make. His name was Lascaris, and his history singular. Of the Piedmontese family of the Lascaris, of Ventimiglia, he regarded himself as descendant of the Emperor of Trebizond. Without tracing his ancestry back so far, he had an uncle Grand Master of the Knights of Malta, and was himself a chevalier. Bonaparte having seized the island on his way, Lascaris followed. Receiver of taxes--excellent place in the East--he met at Cairo a young Georgian slave of great beauty. Abducted at the age of fifteen, she had fallen into the harem of Murad Bey. Lascaris married her, for he was a fervent apostle of universal brotherhood--it is probable that, if she had been ugly, he would not have pushed so far and with so much enthusiasm the application of his principles! On the evacuation of Egypt, he brought his wife to Paris; but her manners and her education were too much out of tune in the brilliant society of that time. After some successes with shawls, some exhibitions of Turkish robes, the Parisian women turned their backs upon her to run to other spectacles more novel. Madame Lascaris begged her husband to return to the East. He did not require pressing, for he him self was deceived in his legitimate ambitions. He solicited through his aunt, Josephine's mistress of the robes, an exalted post. He was offered a place as sub-prefect! Deeply wounded, they returned to Constantinople. There an idea of genius occurred to Lascaris; he proposed to go to Georgia to establish there a new system of agriculture. An Armenian, who was on the look out for victims with money, offered himself as treasurer. The trio crossed the Black Sea, landed in the Crimea and were arrested for espionage. The Armenian made off, naturally, with the cash-box, while Lascaris and his wife were sent to St. Petersburg. Their innocence at last recognised, they found themselves with a very low purse. Then, having gradually lost all that remained--for the chevalier had many odd ideas difficult to realise--he endeavoured to furnish the peasants of the environs of Lattakia with European ploughs, the employment of which would double their harvest. The peasants grew angry, and their unappreciated benefactor was obliged to take himself off promptly. He became professor of music at Aleppo.