You would be amused to hear Sally when Omar does not wake in time to wash, pray, and eat before daybreak now in Ramadan.  She knocks at his door and acts as Muezzin.  ’Come, Omar, get up and pray and have your dinner’ (the evening meal is ‘breakfast,’ the early morning one ’dinner’).  Being a light sleeper she hears the Muezzin, which Omar often does not, and passes on the ‘Prayers is better than sleep’ in a prose version.  Ramadan is a dreadful business; everybody is cross and lazy—­no wonder!  The camel-men quarrelled all day under my window yesterday, and I asked what it was all about.  ’All about nothing; it is Ramadan with them,’ said Omar laughing.  ’I want to quarrel with someone myself; it is hot to-day, and thirsty weather.’  Moreover, I think it injures the health of numbers permanently, but of course it is the thing of most importance in the eyes of the people; there are many who never pray at ordinary times, but few fail to keep Ramadan.  It answers to the Scotch Sabbath, a comparison also borrowed from Sally.

Friday.—­My friend Seleem Effendi has just been here talking about his own affairs and a good deal of theology.  He is an immense talker, and I just put eywas (yes) and la (no) and sahe (very true), and learn manners and customs.  He tells me he has just bought two black slave women, mother and daughter, from a Copt for about 35 pounds the two.  The mother is a good cook, and the daughter is ‘for his bed,’ as his wife does not like to leave Cairo and her boys at school there.  It does give one a sort of start to hear a most respectable magistrate tell one such a domestic arrangement.  He added that it would not interfere with the Sittel Kebeer (the great lady), the black girl being only a slave, and these people never think they have children enough.  Moreover, he said he could not get on with his small pay without women to keep house, which is quite true here, and women are not respectable in a man’s house on other terms.  Seleem has a high reputation, and is said not to ’eat the people.’  He is a hot Mussulman, and held forth very much as a very superficial Unitarian might do, evidently feeling considerable contempt for the absurdities, as he thinks them, of the Copts (he was too civil to say Christians), but no hatred (and he is known to show no partiality), only he ‘can’t understand how people can believe such nonsense.’  He is a good specimen of the good, honest, steady-going man-of-the-world Muslim, a strong contrast to the tender piety of dear Sheykh Yussuf, who has all the feelings which we call Christian charity in the highest degree, and whose face is like that of ‘the beloved disciple,’ but who has no inclination for doctrinal harangues like worthy Seleem.  There is a very general idea among the Arabs that Christians hate the Muslims; they attribute to us the old Crusading spirit.  It is only lately that Omar has let us see him at prayer, for fear of being ridiculed, but now he is