is hereditary to children only—­not to collaterals or ascendants—­and it may be sold, but in that case application must be made to the Government.  If the owner or tenant dies childless the land reverts to the Sultan, i.e. to the Pasha, and if the Pasha chooses to have any man’s land he can take it from him on payment—­or without.  Don’t let any one tell you that I exaggerate; I have known it happen:  I mean the without, and the man received feddan for feddan of desert, in return for his good land which he had tilled and watered.

To-morrow night is the great night of Sheykh Abu-l-Hajjaj’s moolid and I am desired to go to the mosque for the benefit of my health, and that my friends may say a prayer for my children.  The kind hearty welcome I found here has been a real pleasure, and every one was pleased because I was glad to come home to my beled (town), and they all thought it so nice of ‘my master’ to have come so far to see me because I was sick—­all but one Turk, who clearly looked with pitying contempt on so much trouble taken about a sick old woman.

I have left my letter for a long while.  You will not wonder—­for after some ten days’ fever, my poor guest Mohammed Er-Rasheedee died to-day.  Two Prussian doctors gave me help for the last four days, but left last night.  He sank to sleep quietly at noon with his hand in mine, a good old Muslim sat at his head on one side and I on the other.  Omar stood at his head and his black boy Khayr at his feet.  We had laid his face to the Kibleh and I spoke to him to see if he knew anything and when he nodded the three Muslims chanted the Islamee La Illaha, etc., etc., while I closed his eyes.  The ‘respectable men’ came in by degrees, took an inventory of his property which they delivered to me, and washed the body, and within an hour and a half we all went out to the burial place; I following among a troop of women who joined us to wail for ’the brother who had died far from his place.’  The scene as we turned in between the broken colossi and the pylons of the temple to go to the mosque was over-powering.  After the prayer in the mosque we went out to the graveyard, Muslims and Copts helping to carry the dead, and my Frankish hat in the midst of the veiled and wailing women; all so familiar and yet so strange.  After the burial the Imam, Sheykh Abd-el-Waris, came and kissed me on the shoulders and the Shereef, a man of eighty, laid his hands on my shoulders and said, ’Fear not my daughter, neither all the days of thy life nor at the hour of thy death, for God is with thee.’  I kissed the old man’s hand and turned to go, but numberless men came and said ’A thousand thanks, O our sister, for what thou hast done for one among us,’ and a great deal more.  Now the solemn chanting of the Fikees, and the clear voice of the boy reciting the Koran in the room where the man died are ringing through the house.  They will pass the night in prayer,