ading a story which is very hard to pretend as I never
read in my rooms and then I look up and exclaim "Hello, I'm not in New
York, that's Algiers." The thing that has impressed me most is how
absolutely small the world is and how childishly easy it is to go
around it. You and Nora MUST take this trip; as for me I think Willie
Chanler is the most sensible individual I have yet met.

All the fascination of King Solomon's Mines seems to be behind those
great mountains and this I may add is a bit of advance work for mother,
an entering wedge to my disappearing from sight for years and years in
the Congo. Which, seriously, I will not do; only it is disappointing
to find the earth so small and so easily encompassed that you want to
go on where it is older, and new. The worst of it is that it is hard
leaving all the nice people you meet and then must say good-bye to.
The young ladies and Capt. Buckle and Cust came down to see me off and
Buckle brought me a photo four feet long of Gib, an official one which
I had to smuggle out with a great show of secrecy and now I shall be
sorry to leave these people. Just as I wrote that one of the officers
going out to join his regiment came to the door and blushing said the
passengers were getting up a round robin asking me to stop on and go to
Cairo.

Since writing the above lots of things have happened. I bid farewell
to everyone at Malta and yet in four hours I was back again bag and
baggage and am now on my way to Cairo. Tunis and the Bey are
impossible. As soon as I landed at Malta I found that though I could
go to Tunis I could not go away without being quarantined for ten days
and if I remained in Malta I must stay a week. On balancing a week of
Egypt against a week of Malta I could not do it so I put back to this
steamer again and here I am. Tomorrow we reach Brindisi and we have
already passed Sicily and had a glimpse of the toe of Italy and it is
the coldest sunny Italy that I ever imagined. I am bitterly
disappointed about Tunis. I have no letters to big people in Cairo
only subalterns but I shall probably get along. I always manage
somehow with my "artful little Ikey ways." It was most gratifying to
mark my return to this boat. One young woman danced a Kangaroo dance
and the Captain wept and all the stewards stood in a line and grinned.
I sing Chevalier's songs and they all sit in the dining room below and
forget to lay out the plates and last night some of the