and to-morrow there will be the prayer of deliverance in the mosque.  Poor Khayr has just crept in to have a quiet cry—­poor boy.  He is in the inventory and to-morrow I must deliver him up to les autorites to be forwarded to Cairo with the rest of the property.  He is very ugly with his black face wet and swollen, but he kisses my hand and calls me his mother quite ’natural like’—­you see colour is no barrier here.

The weather is glorious this year, and in spite of some fatigue I am extremely well and strong, and have hardly any cough at all.  I am so sorry that the young Rothschild was so hard to Er-Rasheedee and that his French doctor refused to come and see him.  It makes bad blood naturally.  However, the German doctors were most kind and helpful.

The festival of Abu-l-Hajjaj was quite a fine sight, not splendid at all—­au contraire—­but spirit-stirring; the flags of the Sheykh borne by his family chanting, and the men tearing about in mimic fight on horseback with their spears.  My acquaintance of last year, Abd-el-Moutovil, the fanatical Sheykh from Tunis was there.  At first he scowled at me.  Then someone told him how Rothschild had left Er-Rasheedee, and he held forth about the hatred of all the unbelievers to the Muslims, and ended by asking where the sick man was.  A quaint little smile twinkled in Sheykh Yussuf’s soft eyes and he curled his silky moustache as he said demurely, ’Your Honour must go and visit him at the house of the English Lady.’  I am bound to say that the Pharisee ’executed himself handsomely, for in a few minutes he came up to me and took my hand and even hoped I would visit the tomb of Abu-l-Hajjaj with him!!

Since I wrote last I have been rather poorly—­more cough, and most wearing sleeplessness.  A poor young Englishman died here at the house of the Austrian Consular agent.  I was too ill to go to him, but a kind, dear young Englishwoman, a Mrs. Walker, who was here with her family in a boat, sat up with him three nights and nursed him like a sister.  A young American lay sick at the same time in the house, he is now gone down to Cairo, but I doubt whether he will reach it alive.  The Englishman was buried on the first day of Ramadan where they bury strangers, on the site of a former Coptic church.  Archdeacon Moore read the service; Omar and I spread my old flag over the bier, and Copts and Muslims helped to carry the poor stranger.  It was a most impressive sight.  The party of Europeans, all strangers to the dead but all deeply moved; the group of black-robed and turbaned Copts; the sailors from the boats; the gaily dressed dragomans; several brown-shirted fellaheen and the thick crowd of children—­all the little Abab’deh stark naked and all behaving so well, the expression on their little faces touched me most of all.  As Muslims, Omar and the boatmen laid him down in the grave, and while the English prayer was read the sun went down in a glorious flood of light over the distant bend of the Nile.  ‘Had he a mother, he was young?’ said an Abab’deh woman to me with tears in her eyes and pressing my hand in sympathy for that far-off mother of such a different race.