a little at my expense.  In the day I go up and sit in his cabin on deck, and we talk as well as we can without an interpreter.  The old fellow is sixty-seven, but does not look more than forty-five.  He has just the air and manner of a seafaring-man with us, and has been wrecked four times—­the last in the Black Sea during the Crimean War, when he was taken prisoner by the Russians and sent to Moscow for three years, until the peace.  He has a charming boy of eleven with him, and he tells me he has twelve children in all, but only one wife, and is as strict a monogamist as Dr. Primrose, for he told me he should not marry again if she died, nor he believed would she.  He is surprised at my gray hair.

There are a good many Copts on board too, of a rather low class and not pleasant.  The Christian gentlemen are very pleasant, but the low are low indeed compared to the Muslimeen, and one gets a feeling of dirtiness about them to see them eat all among the coals, and then squat there and pull out their beads to pray without washing their hands even.  It does look nasty when compared to the Muslim coming up clean washed, and standing erect and manly—­looking to his prayers; besides they are coarse in their manners and conversation and have not the Arab respect for women.  I only speak of the common people—­not of educated Copts.  The best fun was to hear the Greeks (one of whom spoke English) abusing the Copts—­rogues, heretics, schismatics from the Greek Church, ignorant, rapacious, cunning, impudent, etc., etc.  In short, they narrated the whole fable about their own sweet selves.  I am quite surprised to see how well these men manage their work.  The boat is quite as clean as an English boat as crowded could be kept, and the engine in beautiful order.  The head-engineer, Achmet Effendi, and indeed all the crew and captain too, wear English clothes and use the universal ’All right, stop her—­fooreh (full) speed, half speed—­turn her head,’ etc.  I was delighted to hear ‘All right—­go ahead—­el-Fathah’ in one breath.  Here we always say the Fathah (first chapter of the Koran, nearly identical with the Lord’s Prayer) when starting on a journey, concluding a bargain, etc.  The combination was very quaint.  There are rats and fleas on board, but neither bugs nor cockroaches.  Already the climate has changed, the air is sensibly drier and clearer and the weather much warmer, and we are not yet at Siout.  I remarked last year that the climate changed most at Keneh, forty miles below Thebes.  The banks are terribly broken and washed away by the inundation, and the Nile far higher even now than it was six weeks earlier last year.