nt birds are very
amusing; they walk about with long steps, and stretch their necks. If
allowed, they would tap us all on the head, I think, after the fashion
of the ostriches in that vivid book, _The Story of an African Farm_.

FRENCH AND ENGLISH

Gerard de Nerval begins his volume on Egypt by announcing that the women
of Cairo are so thickly veiled that the European (_i.e._, the
Frenchman?) becomes discouraged after a very few days, and, in
consequence, goes up the Nile. This, at least, is one effort to explain
why strangers spend so short a time in Cairo. The French, as a nation,
are not travellers; they have small interest in any country beyond their
own borders. A few of their writers have cherished a liking for the
East; but it has been what we may call a home-liking. They give us the
impression of having sincerely believed that they could, owing to their
extreme intelligence, imagine for themselves (and reproduce for others)
the entire Orient from one fez, one Turkish pipe, and a picture of the
desert. Gautier, for instance, has described many Eastern landscapes
which his eyes have never beheld. Pictures are, indeed, much to
Frenchmen. The acme of this feeling is reached by one of the Goncourt
brothers, who writes, in their recently published journal, that the true
way to enjoy a summer in the country is to fill one's town-house during
the summer months with beautiful paintings of green fields, wild
forests, and purling brooks, and then stay at home, and look at the
lovely pictured scenes in comfort. French volumes of travels in the East
are written as much with exclamation-points as with the letters of the
alphabet. Lamartine and his disciples frequently paused "to drop a
tear." Later Gallic voyagers divided all scenery into two classes; the
cities "laugh," the plains are "amiable," or they "smile"; if they do
not do this, immediately they are set down as "sad." One must be bold
indeed to call Edmond About, the distinguished author of _Tolla_,
ridiculous. The present writer, not being bold, is careful to abstain
from it. But the last scene of his volume on Egypt (_Le Fellah_,
published in 1883), describing the hero, with all his clothes rolled
into a gigantic turban round his head, swimming after the yacht which
bears away the heroine--a certain impossible Miss Grace--from the
harbor of Port Said, must have caused, I think, some amused reflection
in the minds of English and American readers. It is but just to