of fellaheen and a large income.  He did it for Lord Spencer and for the Duke of Rutland and I shall get as good a fantasia, I have no doubt.  Perhaps at Keneh Maurice had better not see the dancing, for Zeyneb and Latefeeh are terribly fascinating, they are such pleasant jolly girls as well as pretty and graceful, but old Oum ez-Zeyn (mother of beauty), so-called on account of his hideousness, will want us to eat his good dinner.

October 21, 1867:  Sir Alexander Duff Gordon

To Sir Alexander Duff Gordon. URANIA, BOULAK, October 21, 1867.

Dearest Alick,

So many thanks for the boxes and their contents.  My slaves are enchanted with all that the ‘great master’ has sent.  Darfour hugged the horsecloth in ecstasy that he should never again be cold at night.  The waistcoats of printed stuff, and the red flannel shirts are gone to be made up, so my boys will be like Pashas this winter, as they told the Reis.  He is awfully perturbed about the evil eye.  ’Thy boat, Mashallah, is such as to cause envy from all beholders; and now when they see a son with thee, Bismillah! Mashallah! like a flower, verily.  I fear, I fear greatly from the eye of the people.’  We have bought a tambourine and a tarabouka, and are on the look-out for a man who can sing well, so as to have fantasia on board.

October 22.—­I hear to-day that the Pasha sent a telegram hochst eigenhandig to Koos, in consequence whereof one Stefanos, an old Copt of high character, many years in Government employ, was put in chains and hurried off within twenty minutes to Fazoghlou with two of his friends, for no other crime than having turned Presbyterian.  This is quite a new idea in Egypt, and we all wonder why the Pasha is so anxious to ’brush the coat’ of the Copt Patriarch.  We also hear that the people up in the Saaed are running away by wholesale, utterly unable to pay the new taxes and to do the work exacted.  Even here the beating is fearful.  My Reis has had to send all his month’s wages to save his aunt and his sister-in-law, both widows, from the courbash.  He did not think so much of the blows, but of the ‘shame’; ’those are women, lone women, from whence can they get the money?’

November 3, 1867:  Mrs. Ross

To Mrs. Ross.  BOULAK, November 3, 1867.

Dearest Janet,

Maurice arrived on Friday week, and is as happy as can be, he says he never felt so well and never had such good snipe shooting.  Little Darfour’s amusement at Maurice is boundless; he grins at him all the time he waits at table, he marvels at his dirty boots, at his bathing, at his much walking out shooting, at his knowing no Arabic.  The dyke burst the other day up at Bahr Yussuf, and we were nearly all swept away by the furious rush of water.