had sunk floated the red tarboosh of the
Mudir of the Fayoum.

A TREATY OF PEACE

Mr. William Sowerby, lieutenant in the Mounted Infantry, was in a
difficult situation, out of which he was little likely to come with
credit--or his life. It is a dangerous thing to play with fire, so it
is said; it is a more dangerous thing to walk rough-shod over Oriental
customs. A man ere this has lost his life by carrying his shoe-leather
across the threshold of a mosque, and this sort of thing William Sowerby
knew, and of his knowledge he heeded. He did not heed another thing,
however; which is, that Oriental ladies are at home to but one man in
all the world, and that your acquaintance with them must be modified by
a mushrabieh screen, a yashmak, a shaded, fast-driving brougham, and a
hideous eunuch.

William Sowerby had not been long in Egypt, he had not travelled
very far or very wide in the Orient; and he was an impressionable and
harmless young man whose bark and bite were of equal value. His ideas of
a harem were inaccurately based on the legend that it is necessarily
the habitation of many wives and concubines and slaves. It had never
occurred to him that there might be a sort of family life in a harem;
that a pasha or a bey might have daughters as well as wives; or might
have only one wife--which is less expensive; and that a harem is not
necessarily the heaven of a voluptuary, an elysium of rosy-petalled love
and passion. Yet he might have known it all, and should have known it
all, if he had taken one-fifth of the time to observe and study Egyptian
life which he gave to polo and golf and racquets. Yet even if he had
known the life from many stand-points he would still have cherished
illusions, for, as Dicky Donovan, who had a sense of satire, said in
some satirical lines, the cherished amusements of more than one dinner
table:

"Oh, William William Sowerby
Has come out for to see
The way of a bimbashi
With Egyptian Cavalree.
But William William Sowerby
His eyes do open wide
When he sees the Pasha's chosen
In her "bruggam" and her pride.
And William William Sowerby,
He has a tender smile,
Which will bring him in due season
To the waters of the Nile
And the cheery crocodile!"

It can scarcely be said that Dicky was greatly surprised when Mahommed
Yeleb, the servant of "William Wil