porter, with his heavy bale of carpets, or the uncle of Aladdin, with his basket of copper lamps, or the water-carrier clanking his brazen cups, with an immense skin slung round his stooping shoulders.

It is now (1879) more than two years since I wrote these first impressions of the streets of Cairo home to a literary journal. Since then I have resided for four months together in the heart of the town at one time, and then at another; and though my first surprise at the strange sights I saw has worn off, and the Moosky is as familiar to me as Regent Street, I am more than ever convinced that I was correct in saying that those sanguine people who believe in the possibility of reformation and improvement under Turkish rule should visit Egypt. We are so often told of the enlightened policy of the Khedive, that some of us, especially those who only look at Cairo through the windows of a comfortable hotel, are inclined to think that nothing but the incorrigible stupidity of the people prevents their improvement. But a little inquiry soon demonstrates the truth.

Two years ago the viceroy was still popular in England. It was impossible to get at the ear of the public about him. In spite of the fact that he is so completely a Turk that in his own family and court he speaks Turkish, a language as foreign to Arabic as it is to English, I was constantly told that he was not a Turk, and that he had identified himself completely with the country he rules. As to what constitutes a

Turk by descent I cannot say. It would require the genius of Swift to unravel his pedigree. But as to his identifying himself with Egypt, it is a kind of identification similar with that by which the cat may be said to be identified with the mouse she has swallowed. His development of Egypt has ended in reducing her to a state of poverty unknown elsewhere. No doubt he has had money to spend, and equally, without doubt, he has had money to hoard; and has laid up his wealth where neither moth nor rust corrupts, and where no Turk may embezzleperhaps in Paris or London; but of the vast sums which have passed through his hands it is perfectly safe to say not one single Arab peasant on the Nile has been in any way the better.

Some years ago an apology for the Khedive and his family was published in London, and to their endless shame be it spoken, most of the London papers reviewed it favourably, although in full possession of the real facts. The apologist, among other things, asserted the conjugal purity of several members of the family, which read strangely where crowds of black eunuchs, and carriages full of half-veiled ladies, were well-recognised sights. If Prince has only one wife, which is very possible, how many concubines has he? Why did his grandmother make him a present of three Circassian slaves on his birthday? What on earth can his one wife want with two housefuls of attendants who rival or surpass herself in beauty?

About the works of such apologists it would be possible to write any number of similar questions. I would ask them two: Is it true that black slaves are imported now with only as much disguise as deceives people who wish to be deceived? Is it true that the Khedive's chief eunuch-for nobody can deny that he has a chief eunuch and hundreds of others-keeps an establishment for the production and education of these ornaments of the hareem?

All round about Cairo there are vast lath and plaster buildings, chiefly standing in wide gardens and surrounded by high walls; if you ask what they are, the answer is always the same-palaces of the Khedive. Three years ago it was reported that his Highness had thirty-three palaces, and he still went on building. A few days ago a friend of mine and I counted twenty on our fingers. A magnificent but flimsy villa, surrounded by a large park, has just been furnished at Gheezeh, in sight of the Pyramids. Another is in process of completion on the opposite side of the road. There is a long, low house, round three sides of a square, in the heart of the city. There is a long red wall made of hoarding painted to imitate brickwork, facing the island of Roda. There is a splendid but tawdry plasterwork palace at Gezireh, on the west bank opposite Boolak. There is a halfbuilt "hotel" in the French style near Old Cairo. There is a vast series of irregular halls and rooms of state in the citadel. In fact, everywhere you turn

there is some such house building, or built, or abandoned and closed; and every one is a "palace of the Khedive." It is the same as you ascend the river, until it becomes one of the standing jokes of the Nile voyage wherever a house, or gardens, or white walls appear, to ask, "Is that a palace of the Khedive?" And in nine cases out of ten the answer is in the affirmative, while in the tenth case it is that the building in question belongs to one of the Khedive's sons, or sons-in-law, or stepmothers, or cast-off concubines. The money that has been spent on them would have built the pyramids of Gheezeh, yet in any climate but Egypt they would not stand a single winter. They are all made of the same durable materials, namely, lath and plaster. Yet I heard lately that a single staircase in one of them cost 20,000l., and that the Khedive took a dislike to it as soon as it was finished, and so it was pulled down and another built at a similar cost.

When we arrived from the upper Nile in a dahabeeah we anchored our boat near the road to the Pyramids, and remained in her for some days. Every morning when we looked out of our windows early we sawa long and melancholy procession on the bank. First came an ill-looking man in a red fez and a long white shirt, carrying a cane. Then came two or three dozen boys and girls, half naked, footsore, weeping as they limped along, or trying to sing a kind of slow chorus, and following them another man with a cane, which

he freely used to encourage the loiterers. This was a gang of day labourers. The Khedive was filling up some low-lying land with earth taken from the river's bank, and these poor little wretches had been requisitioned from the villages and suburbs to carry the soil from one side of the road to the other. They were paid a microscopic sum—at least it was paid to the taskmaster-and we may hope against hope that they ever got any of it. In the hot midday we passed by the scene of labour and saw them at work, and

after sunset we heard the sad chant of the morning and saw the same processions, without the canes, going home. It was shocking to see young girls carrying huge burdens of earth, or baskets of lime for the builders, or running up and down to the Nile for water for the workers, their feet and often their bare shoulders bleeding. Their lives were indeed "bitter with hard bondage, in mortar and in brick, and in all manner of service in the field." Forced labour is still the rule all through Egypt, as it probably was thirty centuries ago. All the great works have been performed by it.