refreshing to eyes weary with the endless
sand of the Egyptian desert, and the monotony
of the banks of the Suez Canal. The
captain himself is an officer in the Russian
navy, and an urbane polished man of the
world, who looks to our comforts and forestals
our wants with hospitable geniality.
The stewards are as attentive as the
servants to be met with in a well-organised
private house, and they dress for dinner,
putting on white cravats of depth, stiffness,
and substantiality, such as were affected by
the revered Brummel and his royal patron,
and Berlin gloves of spotless hue. We
like this. The sheik remarks sententiously
that it is a good sign; Edward tells anecdotes
of waiters he has known in his travels
from China to Peru, and proves, with
logical minuteness, that cleanliness in a
serving-man should be encouraged by at
once sending him with a commission to the
steamer's bar, while George becomes
sentimental on the subject of dinners in general,
and on that of the approaching Christmas
Day in particular, wonders where he will
eat it, and whether the occasion will be
made blissful by the presence of a family
retainer behind his chair.

We felt positively ashamed of our doubts
concerning the capabilities of the Russian
steamer, when we came to see its appointments,
and the demeanour of its brisk,
intelligent servants, to say nothing of the
dainty dinner service, the spotless linen,
the plates, and the flowers, all of which
made us feel that our pilgrimage to the
Holy Land was to be made easy indeed.
With the exception of the drams of raw
spirit, the cubes of salt fish, and the excellent
caviare, which were handed round
at the commencement of dinner, the repast
was French in its character and cooking,
and was good and elegant after its
kind. There is some wine made from
Crimean grapes, which we pronounce
excellent, as we rise from table with a
placid determination to explore the
pilgrims' quarters, and to ascertain what
their accommodation is like. Our delight
was considerably modified by what we saw.
The pilgrims were packed in little dens
like those in which menagerie-keepers
show their wild beasts, save that there
were no bars. Two stories of these dens
ran along both sides of the deck, and
in each of them were exactly as many
human beings as it would hold. Here were
ragged priests in long black robes and fur
caps like frenzy grey muffs, peasants in
sheep-skins which had been sewn on them
years before, and had never since been
taken off, small Russian farmers and their
wives and children, Turks, Armenians, and
Egyptians, all bound for one or other of
the ports of the Holy Land. They cooked,
eat, slept, and prayed in their dens, and
the pilgrims, in their abject filth and disorder,
almost justified the abhorrence of
the English engineer. They all appeared
to be miserably poor. The Russian peasant
who was a serf yesterday, and is a beast of
burden hampered with superstition to-day,
has been putting by small sums all his
life for the grand work he is now upon.
Before he started on his sacred errand
he satisfied the authorities of Odessa, the
port he took his passage from, that he
had sufficient means to carry him to the
Holy City and to bring him back, and he
is now fulfilling the darling wish of his
heart, for he is about to earn the sanctity
only to be acquired by a pilgrimage to the
Holy Places, and is already calculating on
the relics he will take back. The Mahomedan
in turban and clean robe, who turns to
Mecca and prostrates himself the prescribed
number of times, profoundly indifferent to
surrounders and lookers-on; the black-
robed Armenian, who lies on his stomach to
engrave something in the Greek character
upon a crumpled and dirty piece of paper;
his brother ecclesiastic, who is even more
ragged and less cleanly than himself, and
who is absorbed in his book of prayer;
and the swarthy, handsome silk-merchant
from Damascus, who is on his way to join
his brother's warehouse at Jerusalem, and
who talks " shop," as 'cutely as a Yorkshire
bagman, were types which were repeated
many times in the course of our tour
round the ship's decks. The saloon, with
its elegant cabins and comfortable berths
adjoining, together with the quarter-deck
above, were as free from these passengers
as if they belonged to another vessel;
and there was every facility for walking,
by means of platforms, bridges, and gangways,
from one end of the ship to the other
without touching the main deck. To do this
was to pass at a safe distance over the
double lines of dens, and to see the
strange varieties of life they held. When
night came on, and the rude curtains
of the latter were drawn, and the flickering
lamp lit up the faces of those within, the
effect was weird in the extreme. There
were more pilgrims on the fore-deck, mere
squatters these, who paid a given price,
and spread their bits of carpet and muffled
themselves in turban and robe when