dead were taken to their place beyond the limits of cultivation.  When the banks grew lower, one looked across as much as two miles of green-stuff packed like a toy Noah’s-ark with people, camels, sheep, goats, oxen, buffaloes, and an occasional horse.  The beasts stood as still, too, as the toys, because they were tethered or hobbled each to his own half-circle of clover, and moved forward when that was eaten.  Only the very little kids were loose, and these played on the flat mud roofs like kittens.

No wonder ‘every shepherd is an abomination to the Egyptians.’  The dusty, naked-footed field-tracks are cut down to the last centimetre of grudged width; the main roads are lifted high on the flanks of the canals, unless the permanent-way of some light railroad can be pressed to do duty for them.  The wheat, the pale ripened tufted sugar-cane, the millet, the barley, the onions, the fringed castor-oil bushes jostle each other for foothold, since the Desert will not give them room; and men chase the falling Nile inch by inch, each dawn, with new furrowed melon-beds on the still dripping mud-banks.

Administratively, such a land ought to be a joy.  The people do not emigrate; all their resources are in plain sight; they are as accustomed as their cattle to being led about.  All they desire, and it has been given them, is freedom from murder and mutilation, rape and robbery.  The rest they can attend to in their silent palm-shaded villages where the pigeons coo and the little children play in the dust.

But Western civilisation is a devastating and a selfish game.  Like the young woman from ‘our State,’ it says in effect:  ’I am rich.  I’ve nothing to do.  I must do something.  I shall take up social reform.’

Just now there is a little social reform in Egypt which is rather amusing.  The Egyptian cultivator borrows money; as all farmers must.  This land without hedge or wild-flower is his passion by age-long inheritance and suffering, by, in and for which he lives.  He borrows to develop it and to buy more at from L30 to L200 per acre, the profit on which, when all is paid, works out at between L5 to L10 per acre.  Formerly, he borrowed from the local money-lenders, mostly Greeks, at 30 per cent per annum and over.  This rate is not excessive, so long as public opinion allows the borrower from time to time to slay the lender; but modern administration calls that riot and murder.  Some years ago, therefore, there was established a State-guaranteed Bank which lent to the cultivators at eight per cent, and the cultivator zealously availed himself of that privilege.  He did not default more than in reason, but being a farmer, he naturally did not pay up till threatened with being sold up.  So he prospered and bought more land, which was his heart’s desire.  This year—­1913—­the administration issued sudden orders that no man owning less than five acres could borrow on security of his land.  The matter interested me directly, because I held five hundred pounds worth of shares in that State-guaranteed Bank, and more than half our clients were small men of less than five acres.  So I made inquiries in quarters that seemed to possess information, and was told that the new law was precisely on all-fours with the Homestead Act or the United States and France, and the intentions of Divine Providence—­or words to that effect.