My resolution being therefore taken, and leave obtained, this will be now the place to resume the account of my finances. I have already gone so far as to mention three hundred pounds which I had occasionally borrowed from a Greek whose name was Petros. This man was originally a native of the island of Rhodes, which he must have left early, for he was not at this time much past thirty; he had been by trade a shoemaker. For what reason he left his own country I know not, but he was of a very pleasing figure and address, though very timid. Joas and the Iteghé very much distinguished him, and the king had made him Azeleffa el Camisha, which answers precisely to groom of the stole, or first lord of the bed-chamber in England. Being pliant, civil, and artful, and always well-dressed, he had gained the good graces of the whole court; he was also rich, as the king was generous, and his perquisites not inconsiderable. After the campaign of Mariam Barea, when the dwarf was shot who was standing before Ras Michael, and the palace set on fire in the fray which followed, the crown, which was under Petros's charge, was melted; the gold, indeed, that it consisted of, was afterwards found, but there was said to have been on the top of it a pearl, or jewel, of immense price and size, larger than a pigeon's egg; and this, whatever it was, had disappeared, being in all probability consumed by the fire. Ras Michael, on the contrary, believed that it had been taken out by Petros with a view to sell it, and for this reason he had constantly refused him liberty to leave Abyssinia, and had kept him always in fear that some day or other he would strip him of all that he had saved. While Michael was besieging the mountain Haramat, Petros beseeched me to take L.300 of him, and give him my first, second, and third bill of exchange upon Messrs Julian and Rosa, my correspondents at Cairo, payable a month after sight, to the Maronite Bishop of Mount Sinai, after which he set out for his own country, _in formâ pauperis_, and thereby escaped the rapacity of both Ras Michael and the Naybe of Masuah. As for the bill, it came duly to hand, and was paid to the bishop, who would very fain have received for each of the duplicates, and was near being bastinado'd for insisting upon this before the Bey at Cairo. A Bill drawn from Gondar is a very great curiosity when arrived in London; it should be now upon the file in the shop of my very worthy and honourable friends the Messrs Drummond and Company at Charing-Cross. It was the only piece of writing of any kind which found its way to its intended destination, though many had been written by me on different occasions which presented for Arabia; so that I will recommend to all travellers, for the future, to tack bills of exchange to their letters of greatest consequence, as a sure method of preventing their miscarriage.