ays,
we have enough to keep us fed and clothed and housed. But do thee
keep enough of thy inheritance to bring thee safe home again to
those who love thee. England is ever grey, Davy, but without thee
it is grizzled--all one "Quaker drab," as says the Philistine. But
it is a comely and a good land, and here we wait for thee.

In love and remembrance.

I am thy mother's sister, thy most loving friend.

FAITH.

David received this letter as he was mounting a huge white Syrian donkey
to ride to the Mokattam Hills, which rise sharply behind Cairo, burning
and lonely and large. The cities of the dead Khalifas and Mamelukes
separated them from the living city where the fellah toiled, and Arab,
Bedouin, Copt strove together to intercept the fruits of his toiling, as
it passed in the form of taxes to the Palace of the Prince Pasha; while
in the dark corners crouched, waiting, the cormorant usurers--Greeks,
Armenians, and Syrians, a hideous salvage corps, who saved the house
of a man that they might at last walk off with his shirt and the cloth
under which he was carried to his grave. In a thousand narrow streets
and lanes, in the warm glow of the bazaars, in earth-damp huts, by
blistering quays, on the myriad ghiassas on the river, from long before
sunrise till the sunset-gun boomed from the citadel rising beside the
great mosque whose pinnacles seem to touch the blue, the slaves of
the city of Prince Kaid ground out their lives like corn between the
millstones.

David had been long enough in Egypt to know what sort of toiling it was.
A man's labour was not his own. The fellah gave labour and taxes and
backsheesh and life to the State, and the long line of tyrants above
him, under the sting of the kourbash; the high officials gave backsheesh
to the Prince Pasha, or to his Mouffetish, or to his Chief Eunuch, or to
his barber, or to some slave who had his ear.

But all the time the bright, unclouded sun looked down on a smiling
land, and in Cairo streets the din of the hammers, the voices of the
boys driving heavily laden donkeys, the call of the camel-drivers
leading their caravans into the great squares, the clang of the brasses
of the sherbet-sellers, the song of the vendor of sweetmeats, the drone
of the merchant praising his wares, went on amid scenes of wealth and
luxury, and the city glowed with colour and gleamed with light. Dark
faces grinned over the steaming pot at the