"I hope that the vigorous douche that you have received will have a good effect on you, and save you from another fit of insanity.
"My plans are changed, or rather become what they were at first. I desire more than ever to satisfy my fancy about that incendiary, Canaris; but as that diabolical piratical pilot (May he come to the gallows!) has wrecked my poor yacht, I have chartered a vessel at Malta, and am off for Hydra.
"Good-bye. If we ever meet again we will laugh at all this.
H. FALMOUTH."
"P. S. I leave you the doctor, for the Maltese doctors are said to be detestable. He will hand you a letter of recommendation to the lord governor of the island.
"Send me the doctor when you have no further need of his services."
I have become so stupid from the life of pleasure I have been leading, that I scarcely remember the effect this sarcastic letter had on me.
When I arrived at Malta I called on Lord P——, who showed me great courtesy. He caused active search to be made for the pretended pilot. That wretch had actually been at one time a member of the Royal Navy, but, for two years past, he had given up his position as pilot in the island of Malta.
A description of him was sent throughout the whole Archipelago, where he was supposed to be engaged in piracy.
At Lord P——'s I met a certain Marquis Justiniani, a descendant of that ancient and illustrious family, the Justiniani of Genoa, which had given dukes to Venice and sovereigns to some of the Grecian islands. The marquis owned many country places in the island of Khios, which had just been ravaged by the Turks. He spoke to me about a palace called the Carina Palace, built towards the end of the sixteenth century by the Cardinal Angelo Justiniani. The marquis had for a long time rented the palace to an aga. The description of the palace and the climate seduced me, so I proposed to go to Khios, to visit the palace and the park, and to rent or buy the place if it suited me.