The little district of Koos, including Luxor, has been mulcted of camels, food for them and drivers, to the amount of 6,000 purses—­last week—­18,000 pounds, fact.  I cast up the account, and it tallied with what I got from a sub employe, nor is the discontent any longer whispered.  Everyone talks aloud—­and well they may.

February 7, 1886:  Mrs. Austin

To Mrs. Austin. Tuesday, 7 Ramadan.

Dearest Mutter,

I have just received your letter of Christmas-day, and am glad to answer it with a really amended report of myself.  I had a very slight return a week ago, but for the last five or six days the daily flushing and fever has also ceased.  I sent for one of the Arab doctors of the Azizeeyeh steamer to see Omar, and myself also, and he was very attentive, and took a note of medicines to send me from Cairo by a confrere:  and when I offered a fee he said, ’God forbid—­it is only our duty to do anything in the world for you.’  Likewise a very nice Dr. Ingram saw some of my worst cases for me, and gave me good advice and help; but I want better books—­Kesteven is very useful, as far as it goes, but I want something more ausfuhrlich and scientific.  Ramadan is a great trouble to me, though Sheykh Yussuf tells the people not to fast, if I forbid it:  but many are ill from having begun it, and one fine old man of about fifty-five died of apoplexy on the fourth night.  My Christian patient is obstinate, and fasts, in spite of me, and will, I think, seal his fate; he was so much better after the blistering and Dr. Ingram’s mixture.  I wish you could have seen a lad of eighteen or so, who came here to-day for medicine.  I think I never saw such sweet frank, engaging manners, or ever heard any one express himself better:  quite une nature distinguee, not the least handsome, but the most charming countenance and way of speaking.

My good friend the Maohn spent the evening with me, and told me all the story of his marriage, though quite ’unfit to meet the virtuous eyes of British propriety—­’ as I read the other day in some paper apropos of I forget what—­it will give you an idea of the feelings of a Muslim honnete homme, which Seleem is through and through.  He knew his wife before he married her, she being twenty-five or twenty-six, and he a boy; she fell in love with him, and at seventeen he married her, and they have had ten children, all alive but two, and a splendid race they are.  He told me how she courted him with glasses of sherbet and trays of sweatmeats, and how her mother proposed the marriage, and how she hesitated on account of the difference of age, but, of course, at last consented:  all with the naivest vanity in his own youthful attractions, and great extolling of her personal charms, and of her many virtues.  When he was sent up here she would not, or could not, leave her children.