as sent to fetch like an old fool without his turban, and Rebekah and
the other girls in queer fancy dresses, and the camels with snouts like
pigs. 'If the painter could not go to Es-Sham (Syria) to see how the
Arab (Bedaween) really look,' said Sheykh Yussuf, 'why did he not paint a
well in England with girls like English peasants? At least it would have
looked natural to English people, and the _Vakeel_ would not seem so like
a _majnoon_ (a madman) if he had taken off a hat.' I cordially agreed
with Yussuf's art criticism. Fancy pictures of Eastern things are
hopelessly absurd, and fancy poems too. I have got hold of a stray copy
of Victor Hugo's '_Orientales_,' and I think I never laughed more in my
life.

The corn is now full-sized here, but still green; in twenty days will be
harvest, and I am to go to the harvest-home to a fellah friend of mine in
a village a mile or two off. The crop is said to be unusually fine. Old
Nile always pays back the damage he does when he rises so very high. The
real disaster is the cattle disease, which still goes on, I hear, lower
down. It has not at present spread above Minieh, but the destruction has
been fearful.

I more and more feel the difficulty of quite understanding a people so
unlike ourselves--the more I know them, I mean. One thing strikes me,
that like children, they are not conscious of the great gulf which
divides educated Europeans from themselves; at least, I believe it is so.
We do not attempt to explain our ideas to them, but I cannot discover any
such reticence in them. I wonder whether this has struck people who can
talk fluently and know them better than I do? I find they appeal to my
sympathy in trouble quite comfortably, and talk of religious and other
feelings apparently as freely as to each other. In many respects they
are more unprejudiced than we are, and very intelligent, and very good in
many ways; and yet they seem so strangely childish, and I fancy I detect
that impression even in Lane's book, though he does not say so.

If you write to me, dear Tom, please address me care of Briggs and Co.,
Cairo. I shall be so glad to hear of you and yours. Janet is going to
England. I wish I were going too, but it is useless to keep trying a
hopeless experiment. At present I am very comfortable in health as long
as I do nothing and the weather is warm. I suffer little pain, only I
feel weak and weary.

I have extensive practice in the doctoring l