at my going alone, as they are used to see the English armed and guarded.  Sidi Omar, however, insisted on accompanying me home, which is the civil thing here.  He piled a whole stack of green fodder on his little nimble donkey, and hoisted himself atop of it without saddle or bridle (the fodder was for Mustapha A’gha), and we trotted home across the beautiful green barley-fields, to the amazement of some European young men out shooting.  We did look a curious pair, certainly, with my English saddle and bridle, habit, hat and feather, on horseback, and Sidi Omar’s brown shirt, brown legs and white turban, guiding his donkey with his chibouque.  We were laughing very merrily, too, over my blundering Arabic.

Young Heathcote and Strutt called here, but were hurrying on up the river.  I shall see more of them when they come down.  Young Strutt is so like his mother I knew him in the street.  I would like to give him a fantasia, but it is not proper for a woman to send for the dancing-girls, and as I am the friend of the Maohn (police magistrate), the Kadee, and the respectable people here, I cannot do what is indecent in their eyes.  It is quite enough that they approve my unveiled face, and my associating with men; that is ‘my custom,’ and they think no harm of it.

To-morrow or next day Ramadan begins at the first sight of the new moon.  It is a great nuisance, because everybody is cross.  Omar did not keep it last year, but this year he will, and if he spoils my dinners, who can blame him?  There was a wedding close by here last night, and about ten o’clock all the women passed under my windows with crys of joy ‘ez-zaghareet’ down to the river.  I find, on inquiry, that in Upper Egypt, as soon as the bridegroom has ‘taken the face’ of his bride, the women take her down to ‘see the Nile.’  They have not yet forgotten that the old god is the giver of increase, it seems.

I have been reading Miss Martineau’s book; the descriptions are excellent, but she evidently knew and cared nothing about the people, and had the feeling of most English people here, that the difference of manners is a sort of impassable gulf, the truth being that their feelings and passions are just like our own.  It is curious that all the old books of travels that I have read mention the natives of strange countries in a far more natural tone, and with far more attempt to discriminate character, than modern ones, e.g., Niebuhr’s Travels here and in Arabia, Cook’s Voyages, and many others. Have we grown so very civilized since a hundred years that outlandish people seem like mere puppets, and not like real human beings?  Miss M.’s bigotry against Copts and Greeks is droll enough, compared to her very proper reverence for ‘Him who sleeps in Philae,’ and her attack upon hareems outrageous; she implies that they are brothels.  I must admit that I have not seen a Turkish hareem, and she apparently saw no other, and yet she fancies the morals of Turkey to be superior