his employer had sacked him. As he had come now and then with messages to Queen Square, he found his way, as he explained, 'to die on the threshold of the beautiful pale lady.' Thus he came to be found crouching on Lady Duff-Gordon's doorstep one night, when she was returning from a theatrical party at Dickens's residence. She took him in and had his eyesight cured, afterwards known as Hatty, he was employed as Lady Duff-Gordon's devoted servant and well known to all the visitors. He was also a playmate, to her daughter Janet to the horror of a visiting American author, a Mr. Hilliard, who asked Lady Duff-Gordon could let a negro touch her child, whereupon she called Janet and Hatty to her, and kissed each of them. Hatty contracted consumption and died in the Westminster Hospital in 1850. As her parents had settled in Weybridge the Duff- Gordons spent some summers with them. The house was cold and damp, which lead Janet Duff- Gordon to attribute her mother's later bad health to the incessant colds she caught there. While residing at Weybridge in 1850 Lady Duff-Gordon established and superintended a working-men's library and reading-room. Following the birth of her son Maurice in 1849, Lady Duff-Gordon began to succumb to tuberculosis and by the winter of 1861 she had become so ill that her doctors advised her to travel to a warmer, drier climate. After trying Ventnor for two winters, she went on a voyage to the Cape of Good Hope in 1860, an account of this appeared in Francis Galton's Vacation Tourist, 1862–63, pp. 119–222, under the title "Letters from the Cape". Egypt Upon her return to England she was persuaded to go to Eaux Bonnes in the autumn of 1862, which did her health harm. Lady Duff-Gordon then decided to visit the newly fashionable Egypt, leaving her husband and children behind in England. While she was familiar with the country from reading Herodotus, the Bible, Arabian Nights and Alexander William Kinglake's Eothan they hadn't prepared her for the realities of modern Egypt when she disembarked in Alexandria in October 1862. She noted "what is not pleasant is the absence of all brightness or gaiety, even from young and childish faces." Despite this she made Egypt her home for the rest of her life with the exception of two short visits to England in 1863 and 1865.