otel
office, in uniform, promptly at ten o'clock to-morrow morning. We shall
leave the hotel at that hour, camels having been provided for the
All-Americas and donkeys for the Chicago players, with carriages for the
balance of the party. The Pyramids will be inspected, the Sphinx
visited, and a game played upon the desert near by, beginning at 2
o'clock."

The next morning at half-past nine the court of the Hotel d'Orient held
what it had never held before, and what in all probability it will never
hold again, twenty of the best-known exponents of the National Game that
America could boast of having congregated there in uniform and in
readiness to play ball in the presence of the countless ages that look
down from the summits of the Pyramids and the imprint of whose fingers
is seen in the seamed and scarred face of the Sphinx. In front of the
hotel lay a dozen long-necked camels, saddled and bridled, and
contentedly chewing their cuds, while about them stood as many more of
the patient little donkeys that became so familiar to so many of the
visitors to the Streets of Cairo during the World's Fair days at
Chicago. The dragoman in charge had provided all the donkeys necessary
for the occasion, but other donkey boys managed to get mixed up in a
general melee, and when the boys had mounted the wrong donkeys and went
to get on the right ones a row followed that would have put a Donnybrook
Fair melee to shame, the disappointed donkey boys biting and scratching
their more fortunate competitors and the policemen laying about them
with their bamboo staffs. At last we were all in the saddle, the
All-America team being mounted on the camels and the Chicago boys on
the donkeys and with the ball players leading the way and the carriages
following we moved through the streets of Cairo, past the residence of
the American Minister, where we cheered the old flag that floated over
his quarters, thence over the bridge of the Nile and down through the
Khedive's gardens, the "ships of the desert" lurching along with their
loads like vessels in an ocean storm, and the donkeys requiring an
amount of coaxing and persuasion that proved to be a severe tax upon the
patience of their riders.

The road leading to the Pyramids was a beautiful one running beneath an
avenue arched with acacias until it reached the lowlands of the river
across which it winds until it arrives at the edge of the desert upon
which these great monuments of the kings and