beautiful feature they possess; a closed carriage, with two ladies of a great man's harem; a miscellaneous crowd of sellers of many articles, shouting their goods, and workmen of many trades carrying things they have made; a Bedouin from the desert in his white flowing robes, tall and stately, and a Nubian as black as ebony from up country, with people of all shades between white and black, and in all colours; here and there a European tourist looking very much out of place in his unsightly garments, and a couple of Highland soldiers looking as if the whole place belonged to them. And if one desires to bathe in the life of the place, then he can spend a day drifting up and down the Mooskee, plunging down side alleys, attending native auctions, watching street dramas, bargaining in bazaars, and visiting mosques; but the wise man who is seeking for rest will not abide long in Cairo. Its air is close and not invigorating, its smells innumerable and overpowering, its social occupations wearisome and exacting, and its fleas larger, hungrier, more impudent, and more insinuating than those of any other place I have ever known. When the visitor has seen the citadel—and sunset from the citadel is worth the journey to Cairo—and half a dozen of the grander mosques, and the Pyramids and the great Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, then, although it may be difficult to resist the delightful hospitality of the English community, military and civil, the traveller had better start by the Nile for Upper Egypt. 

 Nothing surely can be so restful as life on a Nile boat, where one lies at his ease upon the deck with some book like Pyramids in Progress in his hand, and watches the procession along the banks of men, women, and children, donkeys, camels, cattle, and occasionally horses, which goes on from Cairo to Assouan, and, so far as I know, to Khartoum, and looking into the far distances of the desert, across the strip of green on either side of the river, and listening to the friendly sound of the water wheels which distribute the Nile through the parched ground, and then standing to see the blood-red sunset fade into orange and green and violet, while the river turns into that delicate and indescribable colour which, for want of some other word, is known as water-of-Nile. The river itself takes hold of the imagination, whose origin has been a historical mystery, on whose rise and fall the welfare of a country depends, which carries the fertility of Egypt in its bosom, and on which nations depend for their very life. No wonder it runs as a blue streak through the frescoes in the tombs, and is never away from the thoughts of the painters, for the Nile runs also through the life of the people. It is the great highway up 

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