I write this to go down by Mr. Palgrave who leaves to-morrow.  He has been with Mustapha Bey conducting an enquiry into Mustapha A’gha’s business.  Mariette Bey struck Mustapha, and I and some Americans took it ill and wrote a very strong complaint to our respective Consuls.  Mariette denied the blow and the words ’liar, and son of a dog’—­so the American and English Consuls sent up Palgrave as commissioner to enquire into the affair, and the Pasha sent Mustapha Bey with him.  Palgrave is very amusing of course, and his knowledge of languages is wonderful, Sheykh Yussuf says few Ulema know as much of the literature and niceties of grammar and composition.  Mustapha Bey is a darling; he knew several friends of mine, Hassan Effendi, Mustapha Bey Soubky, and others, so we were friends directly.

I have not yet got a woman-servant, but I don’t miss it at all; little Achmet is very handy, Mahommed’s slave girl washes, and Omar irons and cleans the house and does housemaid, and I have kept on the meek cook, Abd el-Kader, whom I took while the Frenchman was here.  I had not the heart to send him away; he is such a meskeen.  He was a smart travelling waiter, but his brother died, leaving a termagant widow with four children, and poor Abd el-Kader felt it his duty to bend his neck to the yoke, married her, and has two more children.  He is a most worthy, sickly, terrified creature.

I have heard that a decent Copt here wants to sell a black woman owing to reverses of fortune, and that she might suit me.  Sheykh Yussuf is to negotiate the affair and to see if the woman herself likes me for a mistress, and I am to have her on trial for a time, and if I like her and she me, Sheykh Yussuf will buy her with my money in his name.  I own I have very little scruple about the matter, as I should consider her price as an advance of two or three years’ wages and tear the paper of sale as soon as she had worked her price out, which I think would be a fair bargain.  But I must see first whether Feltass (the Copt) really wants to sell her or only to get a larger price than is fair, in which case I will wait till I go to Cairo.  Anything is better than importing a European who at once thinks one is at her mercy on account of the expense of the journey back.

I went out this morning to the early prayer of Bairam day, held in the burial-place.  Mahmoud ibn-Mustapha preached, but the boys and the Hareem made such a noise behind us that I could not hear the sermon.  The weather has set in hot these last days, and I am much the better.  It seems strange that what makes others languid seems to strengthen me.  I have been very weak and languid all the time, but the camel’s milk has fattened me prodigiously, to Sherayeff’s great delight; and the last hot days have begun to take away the miserable feeling of fatigue and languor.