get.  I hope a nice boy, called Hederbee (the lizard), will come.  They don’t take pay till the day before we sail, except the Reis and Abdul Sadig, who are permanent.  But Hassan and Hoseyn are working away as merrily as if they were paid.  People growl at the backsheesh, but they should also remember what a quantity of service one gets for nothing here, and for which, oddly enough, no one dreams of asking backsheesh.  Once a week we shift the anchors, for fear of their silting over, and six or eight men work for an hour; then the mast is lowered—­twelve or fourteen men work at this—­and nobody gets a farthing.

The other day Omar met in the market an ‘agreeable merchant,’ an Abyssinian fresh from his own country, which he had left because of the tyranny of Kassa, alias Todoros, the Sultan.  The merchant had brought his wife and concubines to live here.  His account is that the mass of the people are delighted to hear that the English are coming to conquer them, as they hope, and that everyone hates the King except two or three hundred scamps who form his bodyguard.  He had seen the English prisoners, who, he says, are not ill-treated, but certainly in danger, as the King is with difficulty restrained from killing them by the said scamps, who fear the revenge of the English; also that there is one woman imprisoned with the native female prisoners.  Hassan the donkeyboy, when he was a marmiton in Cairo, knew the Sultan Todoros, he was the only man who could be found to interpret between the then King of Abyssinia and Mohammed Ali Pasha, whom Todoros had come to visit.  The merchant also expressed a great contempt for the Patriarch, and for their Matraam or Metropolitan, whom the English papers call the Abuna. Abuna is Arabic for ‘our father.’  The man is a Cairene Copt and was a hanger-on of two English missionaries (they were really Germans) here, and he is more than commonly a rascal and a hypocrite.  I know a respectable Jew whom he had robbed of all his merchandise, only Ras Alee forced the Matraam to disgorge.  Pray what was all that nonsense about the Armenian Patriarch of Jerusalem writing to Todoros? what could he have to do with it?  The Coptic Patriarch, whose place is Cairo, could do it if he were forced.

At last my boat is finished, so to-morrow Omar will clean the windows, and on Saturday move in the cushions, etc. and me, and on Sunday go to Alexandria.  I hear the dreadful voice of Hajj’ Alee, the painter, outside, and will retire before he gets to the cabin door, for fear he should want to bore me again.  I do hope Maurice will enjoy his journey; everyone is anxious to please him.  The Sheykh of the Hawara sent his brother to remind me to stop at his ‘palace’ near Girgeh, that he might make a fantasia for my son.  So Maurice will see real Arab riding, and jereed, and sheep roasted whole and all the rest of it.  The Sheykh is the last of the great Arab chieftains of Egypt, and has thousands