Page:Memoirs of the Lady Hester Stanhope.djvu/136

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
122
Memoirs of

why I don’t now try gentle measures with them, rewarding the good, and merely dismissing the idle and vicious: my reply is, 1 did so for years, until I found they abused my forbearance in the grossest manner. Do you think it would frighten the rest, were I to turn away one or two? no such thing. Why, upon one occasion, four of them, after they had received their wages, and had each got a present of new shawls, new girdles, and new kombázes, all went off together, clothes, wages and all, in the night. It is by degrees I am become what I am; and, only after repeated trials and proofs of the inefficiency of everything but severity, that I am grown so indifferent, that I do nothing but scold and abuse them.

"But you talk of cruelty: it is such men as Mustafa Pasha, who was one of those who besieged Acre when Abdallah Pasha was firmanlee" (proscribed), “that you should call cruel; he was indeed a sanguinary tyrant. Doctor, he made a noise sometimes like the low growl of a tiger, and his people knew then that blood must flow. It was his custom, when the fit was on him, to send for some poor wretch from prison, and kill him with his own hand. He would then grow calm, smoke his pipe, and seem for a time quieted. But he was a shrewd man, and a clever pasha. He wrote with his own hand (which pashas never do, except on particular