Such, at all events, is the story as the anonymous biographer relates it, though it is impossible to say on what authority it reposes. Even if it rests upon gossip, and is untrue, it helps to fill in the picture by reflecting the reputation which Byron was making for himself during his Oriental travels: a reputation, on the one hand, of a man who made love with cynical recklessness, and on the other hand of a man who swaggered round the Levant with unwarrantable arrogance and pride. We have already seen him swaggering about his swimming of the Hellespont. He continued to swagger about it to the very end of his life. Even in "Don Juan" there is a well-known reference to the exploit: "_A better swimmer you could scarce see ever; He could, perhaps, have passed the Hellespont, As once (a feat on which ourselves we prided) Leander, Mr. Ekenhead, and I did._" It was a considerable feat, no doubt, though he was only an hour and ten minutes in the water; but the anonymous biographer already quoted adds some details which make it, if not more glorious, at least more dramatic. Byron, according to this version of the story, was helped out of the water in a state of extreme exhaustion, and lay three days in a fisherman's hut, nursed and tended by the fisherman's wife. The fisherman did not in the least know whom he was entertaining, but believed his guest, whose language he could not speak, to be a needy shipwrecked sailor. On his departure, therefore, he pressed on him not only bread and cheese and wine, but also a few copper coins. Byron accepted the gift, without attempting to explain, and a few days afterwards sent his servant with a return gift: a brace of pistols, a fowling piece, a fishing net, and some silk to make a gown for the fisherman's wife. The fisherman was so overwhelmed that he set out at once in his boat to thank the generous donor, and was caught in a sudden squall and drowned. That is a story of which it is impossible to say whether it is true or only well invented. We are on safer ground in taking the testimony of the well-known people who met Byron in the course of his journey; and our principal witnesses are Lady Hester Stanhope, who passed him at Athens on her way to Lebanon, Sir Stratford Canning, afterwards Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, the "great Eltchi," then Secretary of Embassy at Constantinople, and John Galt, who was still going his rounds as a high-class commercial traveller. No one of the three is extravagantly eulogistic, and all three bear witness to the pose, the swagger, and the arrogance.