You will be pleased to hear that your capital story of the London cabman has its exact counterpart here.  ’Oh gracious God, what aileth thee, oh Achmet my brother, and why is thy bosom contracted that thou hast not once said to me d------n thy father, or son of a dog or pig, as thou art used to do.’

Can’t you save up your holidays and come for four months next winter with my Maurice?  However perhaps you would be bored on the Nile.  I don’t know.  People either enjoy it rapturously or are bored, I believe.  I am glad to hear from Janet that you are well.  I am much better.  The carpenter will finish in the boat to-day, then the painter begins and in a week, Inshallah, I shall get back into her.

September 21, 1886:  Mrs. Austin

To Mrs. Austin.  OFF BOULAK, September 21, 1886.

Dearest Mutter,

I am a good deal better again; the weather is delightful, and the Nile in full flood, which makes the river scenery from the boat very beautiful.  Alick made my mouth water with his descriptions of his rides with Janet about the dear old Surrey country, having her with him seems to have quite set him up.  I have seen nothing and nobody but my ‘next boat’ neighbour, Goodah Effendi, as Omar has been at work all day in the boat, and I felt lazy and disinclined to go out alone.  Big Hassan of the donkeys has grown too lazy to go about and I don’t care to go alone with a small boy here.  However I am out in the best of air all day and am very well off.  My two little boys are very diverting and serve me very well.  The news from Europe is to my ignorant ideas desolant, a degringolade back into military despotism, which would have excited indignation with us in our fathers’ days, I think.  I get lots of newspapers from Ross, which afterwards go to an Arab grocer, who reads the Times and the Saturday Review in his shop in the bazaar! what next?  The cargo of books which Alick and you sent will be most acceptable for winter consumption.  If I were a painter I would take up the Moslem traditions of Joseph and Mary.  He was not a white-bearded old gentleman at all you must know, but young, lovely and pure as Our Lady herself.  They were cousins, brought up together; and she avoided the light conversation of other girls, and used to go to the well with her jar, hand in hand with Joseph carrying his.  After the angel Gabriel had announced to her the will of God, and blown into her sleeve, whereby she conceived ‘the Spirit of God,’ Joseph saw her state with dismay, and resolved to kill her, as was his duty as her nearest male relation.  He followed her, knife in hand, meaning always to kill her at the next tree, and each time his heart failed him, until they reached the well and the tree under which the Divine messenger stood once more and said, ’Fear not oh Joseph, the daughter of thy uncle bears within her Eesa, the Messiah, the Spirit of God.’  Joseph married his cousin without fear.  Is it not pretty? the two types of youthful purity and piety, standing hand in hand before the angel.  I think a painter might make something out of the soft-eyed Syrian boy with his jar on his shoulder (hers on the head), and the grave, modest maiden who shrank from all profane company.