Sunday.—­I went to a large unfinished new Coptic church this morning.  Omar went with me up to the women’s gallery, and was discreetly going back when he saw me in the right place, but the Coptic women began to talk to him and asked questions about me all the time I was looking down on the strange scene below.  I believe they celebrate the ancient mysteries still.  The clashing of cymbals, the chanting, a humming unlike any sound I ever heard, the strange yellow copes covered with stranger devices—­it was wunderlich.  At the end everyone went away, and I went down and took off my shoes to go and look at the church.  While I was doing so a side-door opened and a procession entered.  A priest dressed in the usual black robe and turban of all Copts carrying a trident-shaped sort of candlestick, another with cymbals, a lot of little boys, and two young ecclesiastics of some sort in the yellow satin copes (contrasting queerly with the familiar tarboosh of common life on their heads), these carried little babies and huge wax tapers, each a baby and a taper.  They marched round and round three times, the cymbals going furiously, and chanting a jig tune.  The dear little tiny boys marched just in front of the priest with such a pretty little solemn, consequential air.  Then they all stopped in front of the sanctuary, and the priest untied a sort of broad-coloured tape which was round each of the babies, reciting something in Coptic all the time, and finally touched their foreheads and hands with water.  This is a ceremony subsequent to baptism after I don’t know how many days, but the priest ties and then unties the bands.  Of what is this symbolical? Je m’y perds.  Then an old man gave a little round cake of bread, with a cabalistic-looking pattern on it, both to Omar and to me, which was certainly baked for Isis.  A lot of closely-veiled women stood on one side in the aisle, and among them the mothers of the babies who received them from the men in yellow copes at the end of the ceremony.  One of these young men was very handsome, and as he stood looking down and smiling on the baby he held, with the light of the torch sharpening the lines of his features, would have made a lovely picture.  The expression was sweeter than St. Vincent de Paul, because his smile told that he could have played with the baby as well as have prayed for it.  In this country one gets to see how much more beautiful a perfectly natural expression is than any degree of the mystical expression of the best painters, and it is so refreshing that no one tries to look pious.  The Muslim looks serious, and often warlike, as he stands at prayer.  The Christian just keeps his everyday face.  When the Muslim gets into a state of devotional frenzy he does not think of making a face, and it is quite tremendous.  I don’t think the Copt has any such ardours, but the scene this morning was all the more touching that no one was ‘behaving him or herself’ at all.  A little acolyte peeped into the sacramental cup and swigged off the drops left in it with the most innocent air, and no one rebuked him, and the quite little children ran about in the sanctuary—­up to seven they are privileged—­and only they and the priests enter it.  It is a pretty commentary on the words ’Suffer the little children,’ etc.