I meant to have sent you a long yarn by a steamer which went the other day, but I have been in my bed.  The weather set in colder than I ever felt it here, and I have been very unwell for some time.  Dr. Osman Ibraheem (a friend of mine, an elderly man who studied in Paris in Mohammed Ali’s time) wants me to spend the summer up here and take sand baths, i.e. bury myself up to the chin in the hot sand, and to get a Dongola slave to rub me.  A most fascinating derweesh from Esneh gave me the same advice; he wanted me to go and live near him at Esneh, and let him treat me.  I wish you could see Sheykh Seleem, he is a sort of remnant of the Memlook Beys—­a Circassian—­who has inherited his master’s property up at Esneh, and married his master’s daughter.  The master was one of the Beys, also a slave inheriting from his master.  Well after being a terrible Shaitan (devil) after drink, women, etc.  Seleem has repented and become a man of pilgrimage and prayer and perpetual fasting; but he has retained the exquisite grace and charm of manner which must have made him irresistible in his shaitan days, and also the beautifully delicate style of dress—­a dove-coloured cloth sibbeh over a pale blue silk kuftan, a turban like a snow-drift, under which flowed the silky fair hair and beard, and the dainty white hands under the long muslin shirt sleeve made a picture; and such a smile, and such ready graceful talk.  Sheykh Yussuf brought him to me as a sort of doctor, and also to try and convert me on one point.  Some Christians had made Yussuf quite miserable, by telling him of the doctrine that all unbaptized infants went to eternal fire; and as he knew that I had lost a child very young, it weighed on his mind that perhaps I fretted about this, and so he said he could not refrain from trying to convince me that God was not so cruel and unjust as the Nazarene priests represented Him, and that all infants whatsoever, as well as all ignorant persons, were to be saved.  ’Would that I could take the cruel error out of the minds of all the hundreds and thousands of poor Christian mothers who must be tortured by it,’ said he, ’and let them understand that their dead babies are with Him who sent and who took them.’  I own I did not resent this interference with my orthodoxy, especially as it is the only one I ever knew Yussuf attempt.

Dr. Osman is a lecturer in the Cairo school of medicine, a Shereef, and eminently a gentleman.  He came up in the passenger steamer and called on me and spent all his spare time with me.  I liked him better than the bewitching derweesh Seleem; he is so like my old love Don Quixote.  He was amazed and delighted at what he heard here about me. ’Ah Madame, on vous aime comme une soeur, et on vous respecte comme une reine; cela rejouit le coeur des honnetes gens de voir tous les prejuges oublies et detruits a ce point.’  We had no end of talk.  Osman is the only Arab I know who has read a good