The arrival of a notoriety was an incident in the uniformity of Maltese existence. 'They have been long expecting your worship's offspring,' he tells his father, 'so I was received with branches of palm.' He accepted his honours with easy superiority. 'To govern men,' he said, 'you must either excel them in their accomplishments or despise them. Clay does one, I do the other, and we are both equally popular. Affectation here tells better than wit. Yesterday at the racket court, sitting in the gallery among strangers, the ball entered and lightly struck me and fell at my feet. I picked it up, and observing a young rifleman excessively stiff, I humbly requested him to forward its passage into the court, as I really had never thrown a ball in my life.... I called on the Governor, and he was fortunately at home. I flatter myself that he passed through the most extraordinary quarter of an hour of his existence. I gave him no quarter, and at last made our nonchalant Governor roll on the sofa from his risible convulsions. Clay confesses my triumph is complete and unrivalled.' 'I continue much the same,' he reported of himself--'still infirm but no longer destitute of hope. I wander in pursuit of health like the immortal exile in pursuit of that lost shore which is now almost glittering in my sight. Five years of my life have been already wasted, and sometimes I think my pilgrimage may be as long as that of Ulysses.' Like the Greek he was exposed to temptations from the Circes and the Sirens, but he understood the symptoms and knew where to look for safety. 'There is a Mrs. ---- here in Malta,' he writes to Ralph Disraeli, 'with a pretty daughter, _cum multis aliis_; I am sorry to say, among them a beauty very dangerous to the peace of your unhappy brother. But no more of that. In a few weeks I shall be bounding, and perhaps sea-sick, upon the Egean, and then all will be over. Nothing like an emetic in these cases.' [Sidenote: ALBANIAN RIDE]