of wheat and thinking of Ruth, when I started to hear the soft Egyptian lips utter the very words which the Egyptian girl spake more than a thousand years ago:  ’Behold my mother! where she stays I stay, and where she goes I will go; her family is my family, and if it pleaseth God, nothing but the Separator of friends (death) shall divide me from her.’  I really could not speak, so I kissed the top of Omar’s turban, Arab fashion, and the Maohn blessed him quite solemnly, and said:  ’God reward thee, my son; thou hast honoured thy lady greatly before thy people, and she has honoured thee, and ye are an example of masters and servants, and of kindness and fidelity;’ and the brown labourers who were lounging about said:  ’Verily, it is true, and God be praised for people of excellent conduct.’  I never expected to feel like Naomi, and possibly many English people might only think Omar’s unconscious repetition of Ruth’s words rather absurd, but to me they sounded in perfect harmony with the life and ways of this country and these people, who are so full of tender and affectionate feelings, when they have not been crushed out of them.  It is not humbug; I have seen their actions.  Because they use grand compliments, Europeans think they are never sincere, but the compliments are not meant to deceive, they only profess to be forms.  Why do the English talk of the beautiful sentiment of the Bible and pretend to feel it so much, and when they come and see the same life before them they ridicule it.

[Omar, 1864, from a photograph:  ill174.jpg]

Tuesday.—­We have a family quarrel going on.  Mohammed’s wife, a girl of eighteen or so, wanted to go home on Bairam day for her mother to wash her head and unplait her hair.  Mohammed told her not to leave him on that day, and to send for a woman to do it for her; whereupon she cut off her hair, and Mohammed, in a passion, told her to ‘cover her face’ (that is equivalent to a divorce) and take her baby and go home to her father’s house.  Ever since he has been mooning about the yard and in and out of the kitchen very glum and silent.  This morning I went into the kitchen and found Omar cooking with a little baby in his arms, and giving it sugar.  ‘Why what is that?’ say I.  ’Oh don’t say anything.  I sent Achmet to fetch Mohammed’s baby, and when he comes here he will see it, and then in talking I can say so and so, and how the man must be good to the Hareem, and what this poor, small girl do when she big enough to ask for her father.’  In short, Omar wants to exercise his diplomacy in making up the quarrel.  After writing this I heard Mohammed’s low, quiet voice, and Omar’s boyish laugh, and then silence, and went to see the baby and its father.  My kitchen was a pretty scene.  Mohammed, in his ample brown robes and white turban, lay asleep on the floor with the baby’s tiny pale face and little eyelids stained with kohl against his coffee-brown cheek, both fast asleep,