that to do ‘menial offices’ for a guest is an honour and pleasure, and not derogatory at all here.  The ladies cook for you, and say, ‘I will cook my best for thee.’  The worst is that they stuff one so.  Little Ayoosheh asked after my children, and said, ’May God preserve them for thee!  Tell thy little girl that Mohammed and I love her from afar off.’  Whereupon Mohammed declared that in a few years, please God, when he should be balal (marriageable) he would marry her and live with me.  When I went back to the boat the Effendi was ill with asthma, and I would not let him go with me in the heat (a polite man accompanies an honoured guest back to his house or boat, or tent).  So the little boy volunteered, and we rode off on the Effendi’s donkey, which I had to bestride, with Mohammed on the hump of the saddle before me.  He was delighted with the boat, of course, and romped and played about till we sailed, when his slave took him home.  Those children gave me a happy day with their earnest, gracious hospitality.

July 14_th_.—­Since I wrote this, I have had the boat topsy-turvy, with a carpenter and a menegget (cushion-stuffer), and had not a corner even to write in.  I am better, but still cough every morning.  I am, however, much better, and have quite got over the nervous depression which made me feel unable and ashamed to write.  My young carpenter—­a Christian—­half Syrian, half Copt, of the Greek rite, and altogether a Cairene—­would have pleased you.  He would not work on Sunday, but instead, came mounted on a splendid tall black donkey, and handsomely dressed, to pay me a visit, and go out with me for a ride.  So he, I, and Omar went up to the Sittee (Lady) Zeyneb’s mosque, to inquire for Mustapha Bey Soubky, the Hakeem Pasha, whom I had known at Luxor.  I was told by the porter of the mosque to seek him at the shop of a certain grocer, his particular friend, where he sits every evening.  On going there we found the shop with its lid shut down (a shop is like a box laid on its side with the lid pulled up when open and dropped when shut; as big as a cobbler’s stall in Europe).  The young grocer was being married, and Mustapha Bey was ill.  So I went to his house in the quarter—­such narrow streets!—­and was shown up by a young eunuch into the hareem, and found my old friend very poorly, but spent a pleasant evening with him, his young wife—­a Georgian slave whom he had married,—­his daughter by a former wife—­whom he had married when he was fourteen, and the female dwarf buffoon of the Valideh Pasha (Ismail’s mother) whose heart I won by rising to her, because she was so old and deformed.  The other women laughed, but the little old dwarf liked it.  She was a Circassian, and seemed clever.  You see how the ‘Thousand and One Nights’ are quite true and real; how great Beys sit with grocers, and carpenters have no hesitation in offering civility to naas omra (noble people).  This is what makes Arab society quite unintelligible and impossible to most Europeans.