Cairo is cosmopolitan.  You may ride a smart cob, a camel, or a donkey, and nobody will even look twice at you.  You will see harem carriages with closed blinds; coupes with the syces running before them (and there is nothing in Cairo more beautiful than some of these men and the way they run); you will see the Khedive driving with his body-guard of cavalry; you will see fat Egyptian nurses out in basket phaeton with little English children; you will see tiny boys, no bigger than our Billy, in a fever of delight over riding on a live donkey, and attended by a syce; you will see emancipated Egyptian women trying to imitate European dress and manners, and making a mess of it; you will see gamblers, adventurers, and savants all mixed together, with all the hues of the rainbow in their costumes; you will see water-carriers carrying drinking-water in nasty-looking dried skins, which still retain the outlines of the animals, only swollen out of shape, and unspeakably revolting; you will see native women carrying their babies astride their shoulders, with the little things resting their tiny brown hands on their mothers’ heads, and often laying their little black heads down, too, and going fast to sleep, while these women walk majestically through the streets with only their eyes showing; you will see all sorts of hideous cripples, and more blind and cross-eyed people than you ever saw in all your life before; you will see venders of fly-brushes, turquoises, amber, ostrich-feathers, bead necklaces from Nubia, scarabaei and antiquities which bear the hall-marks of the manufacturers as clearly as if stamped “Made in Germany”; you will see sore-eyed children sitting in groups in doorways, with numberless flies on each eye, making no effort to dislodge them; and you will visit mosques and bazaars which you feel sure call for insect-powder; you will see Arabian men knitting stockings in the street, and thinking it no shame; you will see countless eunuchs with their coal-black, beardless faces, their long, soft, nerveless hands, long legs, and the general make-up of a mushroom-boy who has outgrown his strength; you will hear the cawing of countless rooks and crows, and if you leave your window open these rascals will fly in and eat your fruit and sweets; you will see and hear the picturesque lemonade-vendor selling his vile-tasting acid from a long, beautiful brass vessel of irregular shape, and you never can get away from the horrible jangling noise he makes from two brass bowls to call attention to his wares; you will see tiny boys in tights doing acrobatic feats on the sidewalk, walking on their hands in front of you for a whole square as you take your afternoon stroll, and then pleading with you for backsheesh; you will see hideous monkeys of a sort you never saw before, trained to do the same thing, so that you cannot walk out in Cairo without being attended with some sort of a bodyguard, either monkey, acrobat, cripple, or the beggar-girls with their sweet, plaintive voices, their pretty smiles, and their eternal hunger, to coax the piasters from your open purse.  But you accept these sights and sounds as a part of this wonderful old city, and each day the fascination will grow on you until you will be obliged to go to a series of afternoon teas in order to cool your enthusiasm.