ame on board, we
noticed that all the flags were at half-mast. As soon as I landed and
had shown my passport to the customs officer an elegant equipage was
placed at my disposal under the charge of a dragoman, and we drove to
the office of the American consulate, where also the flag was at
half-mast. The sad occasion for this soon became apparent. President
Garfield had died during my voyage across the Mediterranean, and the
whole civilized world was in mourning.

CHAPTER XV.

Alexandria and its Monuments--The Egyptian "Fellahs"--The Mohammedans
and Their Religion--The Voyage Through the Suez Canal--The Red
Sea--The Indian Ocean--The Arrival at Calcutta.

I was now in Africa and Egypt, among the remnants of ancient glory of
which I had read so much, and which I so often had longed to see, in
the wonder-land of Egypt, with which every Christian child is made
acquainted through the first lessons in Bible history, the country to
which Joseph was carried as a slave, and whose actual ruler he finally
became by dint of his wisdom and virtue. I was in the Nile valley where
Pharaoh built his magazines and stored up grain for the seven years of
famine, and whence Moses conducted the children of Israel by means of "a
pillar of a cloud and a pillar of fire." In the land of the pyramids
everything seemed strange and wonderful, and different from anything I
had seen before. The streets crowded with people, the bazaars, the
oriental costumes, the Babylonian confusion of all the tongues of the
earth,--all this combined made on me an overwhelming impression.
Cleopatra's needle; Pompey's pillar; the caravans of camels on their way
into the desert; the old graves and catacombs; the palm groves, the oxen
turning the old-fashioned water-wheels which carry the water from the
Nile for irrigating the fields, just as in the days of Moses,--all this
was reproduced in actual, living pictures before my wondering eyes.
Side by side with these remains of the past we meet with the great
European improvements of our days,--the large ships in the harbor, the
churches, the schools, the universities, the modern markets for trade
and commerce, the splendid hotels and exchanges.

[Illustration: ALEXANDRIA.]

I stopped two days in Alexandria. The second day I visited the summer
palace of the khedive, or vice-king, on which occasion a funny incident
took place. Like every other foreigner coming to Egypt I had bought a
sample of the head-ge