t to feel need
not complain of the monotony of the village, nor pine for the
manufactured excitements of the metropolis.

A letter with a foreign postmark and an Egyptian stamp was handed to me
on Monday morning, and I have been excited and troubled ever since,
though it brought me a great joy. The handwriting was unfamiliar, but
when I turned to the signature I found it was from the squire, and I
began to read it eagerly. I was astonished to find how small and
particularly neat his handwriting is.

The letter ran thus, omitting certain descriptive and unimportant
paragraphs:

"Assouan, Upper Nile,
"_March_ 12_th_, 19--.

"DEAR MISS HOLDEN,

"I wonder if I might claim an old man's privilege and call you 'Grace'?
I should like to do so, for do you know there is not one of your sex in
the wide world whom I have a right to address by the Christian name,
and, what is perhaps more noteworthy, there is no other whose
permission I have the least desire to ask. But somehow or other I am
longing for kinsfolk to-day, and the sensation is almost inexpressibly
acute, so much so that I actually feel the pain of loneliness, and that
'Inner Self' in which, I remember, you trust so completely, cries out
for sympathy and companionship. If I mistake not we have common ideals
and aspirations--you and I--which make us kin, and I am disposed to
'stretch out lame hands of faith' in your direction if haply I may find
you and draw your soul to mine. So if it be your will, let us be
friends, and do you send across the seas and deserts those mysterious
waves of kindly feeling which will vibrate upon the heart of the
solitary old man, to whom earth's messages of love come but seldom--now.

"Have I ever told you that I have not a relative on earth, and that I
have outlived all my own friends? I sometimes feel to be like these
old monuments on the banks of Nile, which stand calm and impassive
whilst the children of this age picnic around their ruins; yet I am no
patriarch, for I have not much overstepped the natural span of man's
existence. I hope you may never experience the sensation, but the fact
that you are yourself amongst earth's lone ones is not the least of the
links that connect you to me.

"I stayed some weeks in Biarritz ... but the weather turned cold and
wet, and the doctors bade me journey to Egypt. It is an unknown land
to my material senses, but not to my spiritual. Every stone preaches
to me of the familiar