I went this morning with Hekekian Bey to the two earliest mosques.  The Touloun is exquisite—­noble, simple, and what ornament there is is the most delicate lacework and embossing in stone and wood.  This Arab architecture is even more lovely than our Gothic.  The Touloun is now a vast poorhouse, a nest of paupers.  I went into three of their lodgings.  Several Turkish families were in a large square room neatly divided into little partitions with old mats hung on ropes.  In each were as many bits of carpet, mat and patchwork as the poor owner could collect, and a small chest and a little brick cooking-place in one corner of the room with three earthern pipkins for I don’t know how many people;—­that was all—­they possess no sort of furniture, but all was scrupulously clean and no bad smell whatever.  A little boy seized my hand and showed where he slept, ate and cooked with the most expressive pantomime.  As there were women, Hekekian could not come in, but when I came out an old man told us they received three loaves (cakes as big as a sailor’s biscuit), four piastres a month—­i.e., eightpence per adult—­a suit of clothes a year, and on festive occasions lentil soup.  Such is the almshouse here.  A little crowd belonging to the house had collected, and I gave sixpence to an old man, who transferred it to the first old man to be divided among them all, ten or twelve people at least, mostly blind or lame.  The poverty wrings my heart.  We took leave with salaams and politeness like the best society, and then turned into an Arab hut stuck against the lovely arches.  I stooped low under the door, and several women crowded in.  This was still poorer, for there were no mats or rags of carpet, a still worse cooking-place, a sort of dog-kennel piled up of loose stones to sleep in, which contained a small chest and the print of human forms on the stone floor.  It was, however, quite free from dust, and perfectly sweet.  I gave the young woman who had led me in sixpence, and here the difference between Turk and Arab appeared.  The division of this created a perfect storm of noise, and we left the five or six Arab women out-shrieking a whole rookery.  I ought to say that no one begged at all.

Friday.—­I went to-day on a donkey to a mosque in the bazaar, of what we call Arabesque style, like the Alhambra, very handsome.  The Kibleh was very beautiful, and as I was admiring it Omar pulled a lemon out of his breast and smeared it on the porphyry pillar on one side of the arch, and then entreated me to lick it.  It cures all diseases.  The old man who showed the mosque pulled eagerly at my arm to make me perform this absurd ceremony, and I thought I should have been forced to do it.  The base of the pillar was clogged with lemon-juice.  I then went to the tombs of the Khalifah; one of the great ones had such arches and such wondrous cupolas but all in ruins.  There are scores of these noble buildings, any one of which