Did he not find men here and there in his travels with whom he would take counsel and who could comfort him?  There is little trace of it, though he never lacked sympathetic friends for his bodily ailments.  In truth he tried to maintain a cheerful exterior, though occasionally he failed in his attempts to do so.  Only once do we find by his letters and diaries that he opened his mind freely on his interior difficulties while in Europe, and that was to Cardinal Deschamps, who gave him, he writes, very great comfort.

No part of his sojourn in the Old World pleased and profited him so much as his trip up the Nile in the winter of 1873-4.

“In information of most various kinds,” he writes, “it has been the richest four months of my whole life.  The value intellectually and religiously as well as physically is incalculable.  Given but one trip, it would puzzle me to name any which can compare with that up the Nile to Wady-Halfa.  Nubia must be included.  It has something of its own which you can find neither in Egypt nor elsewhere:  silence, repose, almost total solitude, and its own peculiar people.”

His companions were few in number and congenial in tastes, the climate mild and equable, and the people and country altogether novel.  The journey, which extended into Nubia, was made in a flat-boat, the Sittina Miriam el Adra—­Our Lady Mary the Virgin—­the sail propelling them when the wind was fair, the crew towing them in calm weather; when the wind was contrary they tied up to the bank.  The progress was, of course, slow, and yet his diary, the only one written during his illness with ample entries, shows that every day gave new enjoyment.  He was provided with letters which enabled him to say Mass at the missionary stations along the river.  The wonderful ruins of the ancient cities of Egypt gave him much entertainment.  But his mind dwelt fondly on thoughts of Abraham, Joseph, and the chosen people, and especially upon the Holy Family, as well as the monks of the desert.  He was much interested in the Mohammedan natives; their open practice of prayer, the instinctive readiness with which the idea of God and of eternity was welcomed to their thoughts, and, withal, their utter religious stagnation, which he traced to their ignorance of the Trinity, filled his mind with questions.  How to convert these sluggish contemplatives, what type of Catholicity would be likely to flourish in the East, and how it could be reconciled with the stirring traits of the West, busied his mind.  He often recalls his distant friends and contrasts new America with old Egypt.  He wrote home when opportunity served, as thus to Father Hewit: