have half killed the two men.  Mustapha behaved extremely well.  He showed sense, decision, and more feelings of humanity than I at all expected of him.  Pray do as I begged you, try to get him paid.  Some of the Consuls in Cairo are barely civil, and old Mustapha has all the bother and work of the whole of the Nile boats (eighty-five this winter), and he is boundlessly kind and useful to the English, and a real protection against cheating, etc.

March 16, 1864:  Mr. Tom Taylor

To Mr. Tom Taylor. March 16, 1864.

Dear Tom,

I cannot tell you how delighted I was to hear that all had gone well with Laura and your little daughter. Mashallah!  God bless her!  When I told Omar that a friend ‘like my brother,’ as Arabs say, had got a baby, he proposed to illuminate our house and fire off all the pistols in the premises.  Pray give my kind love and best wishes to Laura.

I am living here a very quiet, dreamy sort of life in hot Thebes, visiting a little among my neighbours and learning a little Arabic from a most sweet, gentle young Sheykh who preaches on Fridays in the mosque of Luxor.  I wish I could draw his soft brown face and graceful, brown-draped figure; but if I could, he is too devout I believe, to permit it.  The police magistrate—­el-Maohn—­Seleem Effendi, is also a great friend of mine, and the Kadee is civil, but a little scornful to heretical Hareem, I think.  It is already very hot, and the few remaining traveller’s dahabiehs are now here on their way down the river; after that I shall not see a white face for many months, except Sally’s.

Sheykh Yussuf laughed so heartily over a print in an illustrated paper, from a picture of Hilton’s, of Rebekah at the well, with the old Vakeel of Sidi Ibraheem (Abraham’s chief servant) kneeling before the girl he was sent to fetch like an old fool without his turban, and Rebekah and the other girls in queer fancy dresses, and the camels with snouts like pigs.  ’If the painter could not go to Es-Sham (Syria) to see how the Arab (Bedaween) really look,’ said Sheykh Yussuf, ’why did he not paint a well in England with girls like English peasants?  At least it would have looked natural to English people, and the Vakeel would not seem so like a majnoon (a madman) if he had taken off a hat.’  I cordially agreed with Yussuf’s art criticism.  Fancy pictures of Eastern things are hopelessly absurd, and fancy poems too.  I have got hold of a stray copy of Victor Hugo’s ‘Orientales,’ and I think I never laughed more in my life.

The corn is now full-sized here, but still green; in twenty days will be harvest, and I am to go to the harvest-home to a fellah friend of mine in a village a mile or two off.  The crop is said to be unusually fine.  Old Nile always pays back the damage he does when he rises so very high.  The real disaster is the cattle disease, which still goes on, I hear, lower down.  It has not at present spread above Minieh, but the destruction has been fearful.