Thus were we lapsing into the real good old East-Indian style of doing business.  Thus Anglo-Indicus orders his first clerk to execute some commission; the senior, having “work” upon his hands, sends a junior; the junior finds the sun hot, and passes on the word to a “peon;” the “peon” charges a porter with the errand; and the porter quietly sits or doses in his place, trusting that Fate will bring him out of the scrape, but firmly resolved, though the shattered globe fall, not to stir an inch.

The reader, I must again express a hope, will pardon the length of these descriptions,-my object is to show him how business is carried on in these hot countries.  Business generally.  For had I been, not Abdullah the Darwaysh, but a rich native merchant, it would have been

[p.28]the same.  How many complaints of similar treatment have I heard in different parts of the Eastern world! and how little can one realise them without having actually experienced the evil!  For the future I shall never see a “nigger” squatting away half a dozen mortal hours in a broiling sun patiently waiting for something or for some one, without a lively remembrance of my own cooling of the calces at the custom-house of Alexandria.

At length, about the end of May (1853) all was ready.  Not without a feeling of regret I left my little room among the white myrtle blossoms and the rosy oleander flowers with the almond smell.  I kissed with humble ostentation my good host’s hand in presence of his servants-he had become somewhat unpleasantly anxious, of late, to induce in me the true Oriental feeling, by a slight administration of the bastinado-I bade adieu to my patients, who now amounted to about fifty, shaking hands with all meekly and with religious equality of attention; and, mounted in a “trap” which looked like a cross between a wheel-barrow and a dog-cart, drawn by a kicking, jibbing, and biting mule, I set out for the steamer, the “Little Asthmatic.”

[FN#1] The long pipe which at home takes the place of the shorter chibuk used on the road. [FN#2] The jubbah is a long outer garment, generally of cloth, worn by learned and respectable men.  The za’abut is a large bag-sleeved black or brown coloured robe made of home-spun woollen, the garb of the peasant, the hedge-priest, and the darwaysh. [FN#3] The mountain which encircles the globe, according to the sacred geography of the Moslems.  To “go to Kaf” is equivalent to our “go to Jericho,” or-somewhere else. [FN#4] Sir G. Wilkinson, referring his readers to Strabo, remarks that the “troublesome system of passports seems to have been adopted by the Egyptians at a very early period.”  Its present rigours, which have lasted since the European troubles in 1848 and 1849, have a two-fold object; in the first place, to act as a clog upon the dangerous emigrants which Germany, Italy, and Greece have sent out into the world; and secondly, to confine the subjects of the present Pasha of Egypt to their fatherland and