nestly desired to
put an end to. At length, though the pertinacity of the woman was
astonishing, when exhausted by blows, she lay fainting on the ground,
the man went his way. The spectators, and there were many, who looked
on without any attempt to rescue this poor creature from her savage
assailant, now raised her from the earth. The whole of this time, the
veil she wore was never for a moment displaced, and but for the brutal
nature of the scene, it would have been eminently ridiculous in the
eyes of a stranger. After crying and moaning for some time, in the
arms of her supporters, the woman, whom I now found to be a vender of
vegetables in the street, told her sad tale to all the passers-by
of her acquaintance, with many tears and much gesticulation, but at
length seated herself quietly down by her baskets, though every bone
in her body must have ached from the severe beating she had received.
This appeared to me to be a scene for the interference of the police,
who, however, do not appear to trouble themselves about the protection
of people who may be assaulted in the street.

I afterwards saw a drunken Englishman, an officer of the Indian
army, I am sorry to say, beat several natives of Cairo, with whom
he happened to come in contact in the crowd, in the most brutal and
unprovoked manner, and yet no notice was taken, and no complaint
made. It was certainly something very unexpected to me to see a Frank
Christian maltreating the Moslem inhabitants of a Moslem city in which
he was a stranger, and I regretted exceedingly that the perpetrator
of acts, which brought disgrace upon his character and country, should
have been an Englishman, or should have escaped punishment. No sooner
have we been permitted to traverse a country in which formerly it was
dangerous to appear openly as a Christian, than we abuse the privilege
thus granted by outrages on its most peaceable inhabitants. I regret
to be obliged to add, that it is but too commonly the habit, of
Englishmen to beat the boat-men, donkey-men, and others of the poorer
class, whom they may engage in their service. They justify this
cowardly practice--cowardly, because the poor creatures can gain no
redress--by declaring that there is no possibility of getting them to
stir excepting by means of the whip; but, in most cases, all that I
witnessed, they were not at the trouble of trying fairer methods:
at once enforcing their commands by blows. The comments made by the
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