afety for her
son in the hands of the quaint, clear-minded daughter of her old friend
and kinswoman, Mercy Marlowe.

II

Within three months David and Hope had seen the hills of Moab from the
top of the Mount of Olives; watched the sun go down over the Sea of
Galilee; plucked green boughs from the cedars on Lebanon; broken into
placid exclamations of delight in the wild orchard of nectarine blossoms
by the lofty ruins of Baalbac; walked in that street called Straight at
Damascus; journeyed through the desert with a caravan to Palmyra when
the Druses were up; and, at last, looked upon the spot where lived that
Pharaoh who knew not Joseph.

In this land they stayed; and even now far up the Nile you will hear of
the Two Strange People who travelled the river even to Dongola and some
way back--only some way back, for a long time. In particular you will
hear of them from an old dragoman called Mahommed Ramadan Saggara, and
a white-haired jeweller of Assiout, called Abdul Huseyn. These two
men still tell the tale of the two mad English folk with faces like
no English people ever seen in Egypt, who refused protection in their
travels, but went fearlessly among the Arabs everywhere, to do good and
fear not. The Quaker hat and saddened drab worked upon the Arab mind to
advantage.

In Egypt, David and Hope found their pious mission--though historians
have since called it "whimsical and unpractical": David's to import the
great Syrian donkey, which was to banish the shame of grossly burdening
the small donkey of the land of Pharaoh; and Hope's to build schools
where English should be taught, to exclude "that language of Belial,"
as David called French. When their schemes came home to Framley, with
an order on David's bankers for ten thousand pounds, grey-garbed
consternation walked abroad, and in meeting the First Day following
no one prayed or spoke for an hour or more. At last, however, friend
Fairley rose in his place and said:

"The Lord shall deliver the heathen into their hands."

Then the Spirit moved freely and severely among them all, and friend
Fairley was, as he said himself, "crowded upon the rails by the
yearlings of the flock." For he alone of all Framley believed that David
and Hope had not thrown away the Quaker drab, the shovel hat and the
poke bonnet, and had gone forth fashionable, worldly and an hungered,
among the fleshpots of Egypt. There was talk of gilded palaces,
Saracenic splendours and dark sug