I don’t like to think too much about seeing you and Maurice next winter for fear I should be disappointed.  If I am too sick and wretched I can hardly wish you to come because I know what a nuisance it is to be with one always coughing and panting, and unable to do like other people.  But if I pick up tolerably this summer I shall indeed be glad to see you and him once more.

This house is falling sadly to decay, which produces snakes and scorpions.  I sent for the hawee (snake-catcher) who caught a snake, but who can’t conjure the scorpions out of their holes.  One of my fat turkeys has just fallen a victim, and I am in constant fear for little Bob, only he is always in Omar’s arms.  I think I described to you the festival of Sheykh Gibrieel:  the dinner, and the poets who improvised; this year I had a fine piece of declamation in my honour.  A real calamity is the loss of our good Maohn, Seleem Effendi.  The Mudir hailed him from his steamer to go to Keneh directly, with no further notice.  We hoped some good luck for him, and so it would have been to a Turk.  He is made overseer over the poor people at the railway work, and only gets two pounds five shillings per month additional, he has to keep a horse and a donkey, and to buy them and to hire a sais, and he does not know how to squeeze the fellaheen.  It is true ’however close you skin an onion, a clever man can always peel it again,’ which means that even the poorest devils at the works can be beaten into giving a little more; but our dear Seleem, God bless him, will be ruined and made miserable by his promotion.  I had a very woeful letter from him yesterday.

May 15, 1867:  Sir Alexander Duff Gordon

To Sir Alexander Duff Gordon.  LUXOR, May 15, 1867.

Dearest Alick,

All the Christendom of Upper Egypt is in a state of excitement, owing to the arrival of the Patriarch of Cairo, who is now in Luxor.  My neighbour, Mikaeel, entertains him, and Omar has been busily decorating his house and arranging the illumination of his garden, and to-day is gone to cook the confectionery, he being looked upon as the person best acquainted with the customs of the great.  Last night the Patriarch sent for me, and I went to kiss his hand, but I won’t go again.  It was a very droll caricature of the thunders of the Vatican.  Poor Mikaeel had planned that I was to dine with the Patriarch, and had borrowed my silver spoons, etc., etc., in that belief.  But the representative of St. Mark is furious against the American missionaries who have converted some twenty Copts at Koos, and he could not bring himself to be decently civil to a Protestant.  I found a coarse-looking man seated on a raised divan smoking his chibouk, on his right were some priests on a low divan; I went up and kissed his hand and was about to sit by the priests, but he roughly ordered a cawass to put a wooden chair off