I am going to write to Palgrave and ask him to let me send another boy or the money for Mabrook, who can’t endure the notion of leaving me.  Achmet, who was always hankering after the fleshpots of Alexandria, got some people belonging to the boats to promise to take him, and came home and picked a quarrel and departed.  Poor little chap; the Sheykh el-Beled ‘put a spoke in his wheel’ by informing him he would be wanted for the Pasha’s works and must stay in his own place.  Since he went Mabrook has come out wonderfully and does his own work and Achmet’s with the greatest satisfaction.  He tells me he likes it best so; he likes to be quiet.  He just suits me and I him, it is humiliating to find how much more I am to the taste of savages than of the ‘polite circles.’

The old lady of the Maohn proposed to come to me, but I would not let her leave her home, which would be quite an adventure to her.  I knew she would be exclamatory, and lament over me, and say every minute, ’Oh my liver.  Oh my eyes!  The name of God be upon thee, and never mind! to-morrow please God, thou wilt be quite well,’ and so forth.  People send me such odd dishes, some very good.  Yussuf’s wife packed two calves’ feet tight in a little black earthern pan, with a seasoning of herbs, and baked it in the bread oven, and the result was excellent.  Also she made me a sort of small macaroni, extremely good.  Now too we can get milk again, and Omar makes kishta, alias clotted cream.

Do send me a good edition of the ‘Arabian Nights’ in Arabic, and I should much like to give Yussuf Lane’s Arabic dictionary.  He is very anxious to have it.  I can’t read the ‘Arabian Nights,’ but it is a favourite amusement to make one of the party read aloud; a stray copy of ’Kamar ez-Zeman and Sitt Boodoora’ went all round Luxor, and was much coveted for the village soirees.  But its owner departed, and left us to mourn over the loss of his MSS.

I must tell you a black standard of respectability (it is quite equal to the English one of the gig, or the ham for breakfast).  I was taking counsel with my friend Rachmeh, a negro, about Mabrook, and he urged me to buy him of Palgrave, because he saw that the lad really loved me.  ‘Moreover,’ he said, ’the boy is of a respectable family, for he told me his mother wore a cow’s tail down to her heels (that and a girdle to which the tail is fastened, and a tiny leathern apron in front, constituted her whole wardrobe), and that she beat him well when he told lies or stole his neighbours eggs.’  Poor woman; I wish this abominable slave trade had spared her and her boy.  What folly it is to stop the Circassian slave trade, if it is stopped, and to leave this.  The Circassians take their own children to market, as a way of providing for them handsomely, and both boys and girls like being sold to the rich Turks; but the blacks and Abyssinians fight hard for their own liberty and that of their cubs.  Mabrook swears that there were two Europeans