nd note. I refused your offer, but have preserved the
recollection of it, though you may have lost it."

To calculate the degree of gratitude due to a service rendered, would
have seemed ingratitude in his eyes. He could create beings who were
capable of doling it out in that way, but to apply it to himself was an
impossibility.

His predilection for the inhabitants of Epirus, of Albania, and for the
Suliotes, is known. This predilection originated in the gratitude which
he felt for the care taken of him by two Albanian servants who doted on
him, during an illness which he had at Patras at the time when he
visited that place for the first time. It was also on the Albanian coast
that he was wrecked on one occasion, and where he received that
hospitality which he has immortalized in Don Juan.

Byron's predilection for this people even overcame the effects which
their ingratitude might have produced, for it is matter of history, how
badly the barbarous Suliotes behaved to him at Missolonghi a short time
before his death; they who had been so benefited by his kindness to
them.

The memory of services done to him was not susceptible of change, and
neither time nor distance could in the least affect it. The moment he
had contracted a debt of gratitude, he believed himself obliged to pay
interest upon it all his life, even had he discharged his debt. One
single anecdote will serve to illustrate the truth of these remarks. On
the eve of his last departure from London in 1816, when the cruelty of
his enemies, powerfully seconded by the spite of Lady Byron, had
succeeded in so perverting facts as to give their calumnies the color of
truth, and to throw upon his conduct as a husband so false a light as to
hold him up to universal execration, it required great courage to
venture on his defense. Lady Jersey did it. She--who was then quite the
mistress of fashion by her beauty, her youth, her rank, her fortune,
and her irreproachable conduct--organized a fete in honor of Byron, and
invited all that was most distinguished in London to come and wish Byron
farewell.

Among those who responded to the noble courage of Lady Jersey was one
equally deserving of praise, Miss Mercer, now Lady K----. This conduct
of Miss Mercer was all the more creditable that there had been a
question of her marriage with Lord Byron, and that Miss Milbank had been
preferred to her.

This party gave Byron a great insight into the human heart, and showed