we heard a great noise and yelling outside.  Presently Hassan Bey reappeared smiling, and let us out.  The crowd had disappeared, and a battalion of Egyptian infantry had taken its place.  Advised by the Bey, we left Jerusalem a day after this scuffle, with much regret on my part.  The sight of all the spots which are glorified by the splendid stories of our religious history had impressed me deeply.  My imagination had conjured up the very pictures in Royaumont’s illustrated Bible, out of which I had learnt both the Old and the New Testament.  And just as I was about to start, when I opened the window of the room I occupied in the Latin convent, I saw just in front of me the picture in that same Bible which represents David, with hands uplifted in admiration, as he gazes at Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite.  I was the David, and Bathsheba was a woman, looking really magnificent in her eastern robes, who was sitting on the terrace facing me.  Only she was not combing out her hair like the woman in the Bible picture:  she was hunting it for vermin!

I returned from Jerusalem by the Dead Sea, Nazareth, and Acre.

As we were riding along one night, to escape the heat, not far from Nazareth, we met a troop of horsemen headed by an individual in Egyptian dress, who announced himself as Ibrahim Aga, sent by Soliman Pasha to meet me.  Just as I was calling up the dragoman to translate what I had to say to him, Ibrahim Aga said to me in a drawling voice, “Don’t give yourself that trouble, it isn’t the least necessary.  I am the Marquis de Beaufort, captain on the staff.”  He was in fact one of the very many French officers, who were detached to the Egyptian army then lying in cantonments in Syria, after its victories over the Turks at Homs and Konieh.  I had seen and greatly admired these troops all over Syria and at Acre.  I was soon to see Soliman Pasha—­in other words, Colonel Selves, a Frenchman, who had organized them, and under the energetic and iron-willed son of Mehemet Ali, Ibrahim Pasha, had led them to victory.  I beheld a little man, whom long residence in Egypt had quite orientalized in appearance but who had preserved all the vivacity of his Gallic wit.  The Iphigenie returned to France by Malta, where I made the acquaintance of Lord Brudenell, since celebrated under the name of Lord Cardigan, for his famous Balaclava charge and of Major Rose, a charming fellow, who later became the Sir Hugh Rose of the Crimean War, and after that Field-Marshal Lord Strathnairn of the Indian Mutiny.  At that moment Major Rose commanded the 42nd Highlanders, the famous “Black Watch,” a splendid regiment, especially so then, when it consisted of nothing but veterans of Herculean build.  It furnished the Guard of Honour that received me at the Palace of the Grand Masters when I went to pay my respects to the governor, and the salute of that splendid body of men in full-dress uniform and feathered bonnets, with their colours lowered to the ground, their band