it as a parting gift to his faithful donkey-boy.
Achmed, a member of the fraternity, assured
me that "Merrian Howaga" (gentleman, literally
merchant) " promise buy me wife: but I say,
No—no want wife, than'ee, sare." Upon
being pressed, Achmed assured me that the
piastres were offered in a bonâ fide manner, and
poured out from the one hand of the Howaga
to another.

To see these boys to advantage, go to the
rude stone platform outside the door of
Shepherd's Hotel, at Cairo, the morning after the
English steamer has arrived.

It is about half-past eight o'clock, and the
first breakfast-gong has sounded. The early
risers are already seated on chairs outside the
door, intent on witnessing an Arab juggler, not,
perhaps, such an one as hardened Pharaoh's
heart, but no fool either. See! he whips out of a
goat-skin bag three snakes — yellow wretches,
with whitish bellies — they twine round his feet,
and, rearing up their heads, puff out their
hoods, and dart their quivering tongues towards
his legs, with jerking darts. The wily Arab
pretends to be alarmed: he takes up all three
snakes by the tails, and waves them like a Medusa
scourge in the face of the greenest griffin
present, who is struggling with a large cigar that
makes him silent and thoughtful, and he draws
back, under pretext of asking the waiter for a
light, for " these confounded cigars are always
going out, you know."

A dragoman, vexed at seeing me amused at
this, slides up, and tells me that all this is
nothing. "Poor thing! what you think?" and that
if I choose to pay three or four dollars, he will
bring Darweesh, who will eat snakes, chew live
coals, stab himself, and eat a glass lamp—
"What you think?" — which generous offer I
decline, as well as I do his proposal to bring
me a man who will put a child in a wicker-
basket, cut it in pieces, and then bring it to
life.

An order from the griffin to "get another
chair, old fellow, for my feet!" rescues me from
this parasite just as a roar of laughter breaks
from the platform, as a little pet donkey of the
juggler, being asked who is the cleverest man
present, nuzzles his nose into his employer's
ear, as if whispering a name, which the juggler
asserts is his (the juggler's) own. A performing
goat next appears, and balances his four legs on
a small balustrade of wood, which the juggler
keeps heightening by the addition of fresh
stands.

Half an hour later, imagine the same place,
breakfast over; a crowd of serene and
contented Englishmen, with the best possible
opinion of the world, pours forth all eager to ride
to the citadel, the great mosques, the baths, the
Nilometer, or the great Pyramids themselves.
Thirty donkeys trot to the front, thirty boys
roar out the names of their donkeys—their
pedigrees, their ages, their prices, their capabilities,
and their drivers' titles. It is "Here's Captain
Snook Howaga!" "Try Billy Thompson, master!"

Him very good donkey ! Achmed's donkey !"
"Here's your donkey, sare!" "I'm Mohammed,
sare!" "Here's Selim!" This jangle is put an
end to by the avatar of Ginowlee the Nubian, in
a crimson tarboosh, flowing white robe, and bare
feet, who, liberally administering a course of
his hippopotamus-hide whip, which, like himself,
comes from the second cataract, soon quells the
riot. Ginowlee is the terror of the donkey-boys,
and is retained by the hotel expressly to keep
down their sudden insurrections. Encouraged
by the lull, the hardier English mount the foremost
donkeys, the stirrups being held for them;
others, particularly the more elderly gentlemen,
are fought for, bumped off one donkey and lifted
on another, as if they were plunder, and the
boys were the forty thieves fighting for it.
Eventually the crowd thins, the leading donkeys
canter off at a matchless pace, and the rest, with
various degrees of speed, dash onward past the
Coptic quarter towards the bazaars.

Alas! into that sleepy city of the Arabian
Nights those donkeys will carry tumult, misery,
and confusion. They will charge into the
bazaar-row of out-door shops. They will knock
down aged charcoal-drivers, and bump green-
turbaned shereefs, or descendants of the Prophet.
They will rout marriage processions, and respect
not even the solemnity of the funeral. Before
them will be mirth and rejoicing, behind them,
mourning and desolation.

Let the seller of the henna-powder, and he
who vends the black kohl for ladies' eyelids,
beware. Let the barber, putting up trees of
lamps and strings of green and red flags in the
street of the wedding, be vigilant, or he will
soon catch the ugliest of falls, for the Franks, the
dreadful Franks, mounted on their war-donkeys,
come riding like Eblis. Let the seller of goats'-
flesh at the corner of the bazaar remove his
clumsy block of sycamore and his brass rings and
crimsoned axe, for they who ride, ride like
lubricated lightning. Ye too, makers of palm-stick
baskets, resembling those cages in which the
pigeon, the holy bird that whispered into the
Prophet's ear, are brought to market — ye who,
holding the long rod between your toes, deftly
split and shred the palm-sticks, look out, for the
day of your vexation approacheth! The Franks
in tubular turbans come riding till their faces are
blackened with extreme speed. Keep, too, a
vigilant outlook, O ye people who inhabit the street of
the slipper-makers, for the noisy pounding of your
brass pestles, as ye flatten the red and yellow
leather, is wont to crush all other noises in your
ears; and ye, barbers of the barber-street, be
not too intent to steep in lather the shorn heads
of the faithful in the brazen basins, lest ye,
too, share the common ruin. The Franks — the
Franks, with tubular turbans—are coming on
swift asses, and with the speed of lightning!

Happy blind men, in the lofty balconies of the
minarets above the flesh market, proclaiming
the hour of prayer, saying, "Come to prayer—
come to prayer! prayer is the food of the
righteous!" for they alone are safe from the hoofs
of the maddened asses of Eblis, and from the
curses of these black-robed Ghins of the West.