as the Italian vine-dresser said, when his village
saint, after a long drought, sent more than
enough of rain. The miraculous drop from
the star, as the Moslem legend has it, has
been potent in its working as any drop ever
brewed by high-charging medicine man. The
street crier who proclaims the rise of the
river had been joyful in his pious announcement.*
The pieces of Nile earth had been duly
eaten by the superstitious Cairo women, with,
I hope, the usual nausea. Everybody rejoiced
and was glad. The black fields sang together.
The soft green sugar-canes nestled together and
kissed each other. The glad lark over the millet-
fields sang solos of joy and hope, and only the
man who had not paid his taxes to the basha
was sad, and toiled on lazily and slow after his
herd of thirsty buffaloes.

* " I extol the perfection of Him who spread out
the earth, and hath given running rivers through
whom the fields become green."

Everywhere the fields were slimy black with
moisture, and the green blades came up keen,
fine, and sharp, all in the livery colour of the
Prophet, like so many files of true believers
ranged in procession. The water was in every
stage of subsidence; here a pool, there a slimy
drift; now a lake, presently a black swamp where
the grey crows waded to the worm they were
about to swallow whole. The cotton was getting
fast into a pale yellow brown, not unobserved by
Manchesterian eyes. The great lavish doora
with the flag-leaf tossed its great branches of
grain into the rainless air. The dark-skinned
peasants were toiling with the heavy adzes that
serve them as spades as well as hoes. The
bullock-ploughs crept sleepily along. The sowers
were out, tossing their broad handfuls. All
Egypt sang for joy— from the pasha in the first-class
carriage, to the meanest scavenger in Cairo.

But why " the pasha in the first-class
carriage"? asks an inquiring, controversial, and
healthily sceptical mind. Be it known to the
healthy sceptic that the present pasha has a
passion, not for improving and increasing the
number of railways, but for employing them. He
"lives along the line," in fact, as Pope's sensitive
spider formerly did. He spends whole nights in
railway carriages. It is even said, such is the
playful freshness of his despotic fancy, that it
took the whole band of European consuls some
weeks, to induce him to abstain from trying the
effects of a collision between two full trains . It is,
perhaps, vexing to have your business trains
shunted off for three hours into a siding, whilst
the pasha's harem passes by; but still I say, in
the name of the whole railway interest of Egypt,
God bless the pasha, with all his little
eccentricities, for he disbands armies (being, by-the-by,
obliged) where Mohammed Ali collected them,
and he employs clever heads, where Mohammed
used to lop them off.

But sending on the pasha by an express train,
let us observe for ourselves an Egyptian railway
station, taking any of the larger ones— say
Ben Haramee. It is a long scattered white and
yellow washed building, without shape and without
order. The large fenced-off place, with
great wooden rails like a bear's den, is the
luggage department. The dark fellow with the
red fez and nondescript Oriental dress, is the
clerk, who spends half his time in telling a
fellah boy in a blue smock not to open the
great door, at which half a dozen noisy Arabs
wanting tickets, and not knowing where to go,
are bawling and clamouring. If a parcel comes
for you, it is almost impossible to wring it from
such a man as this. If you do not come
all in arms and shouting for it, he will let it
remain until it gets mouldy in his den, uttering
over it now and then great ejaculations regarding
its size and weight, as " Wullah!" "Ageeb!"
"Kayf Kebeer!" The telegraph department
up-stairs, on a sort of out-of-the-way terrace, is
equally well managed. An old Arab hag is there,
squatting over a pan at which she rinses clothes;
she stares at you as you fill up the telegraph
form, the clerk sleepily takes it, and the answer
from a place thirty miles away comes some five
hours after you have despatched the inquiry.
The poor people waiting to go by the train
are rather naked, somewhat dirty, but
picturesque in the extreme. One tall fellow, with
his right arm and shoulder bare, carries a bundle
of green palm-boughs, upon which a bright
little brown nude boy, with his head shaven, all
but one frightened little top-knot, strides and
scrambles. Others, with only loin clothes, and
looking like antique Egyptian figures, carry
the heavy shipwright's adze with which they
hoe and dig. There are women with nose-rings
and blue tattooed chins. They carefully hide
their hideous faces, all but one painted eye, as
we pass. A Copt tax-collector in a dark turban—
the modern Egyptian is generally white— passes
with writing-case in his sash: unhappy the poor
fellah in arrears whose name in those magical-
looking Arabic characters his reed pen shall
tonight write down in anger! Those two brotherly
dervishes, in smooth brown felt caps, walking
together so blandly, like quiet men of God going
out to seek where to do good, and scatter their
words of love, may be, for anything I know,
notorious serpent-charmers, mad eaters of small
glass lamps, or of snakes, at public festivals. But
a water-seller, carrying at his back a finely-
shaped jar of greyish clay, the base cased in a
cord net, and the spout guarded with metal,
comes, holding a cup in his hand, and shouting
his hope that God will reward him. I take my
draught, and pay for it in infinitesimal coppers.
A jostle of turbans, a clamour of Arabic,
draws my attention to quite another quarter.
There has been a quarrel just outside the station
between two Greeks— clerks, I think, or small
peddling dealers. The weaker of the two,
a Memnonian-nosed and vacant-looking cheat,
in swaying trunk-hose, pale and frightened,
kneels on one knee, looking with horror at the
blood that flows on the ground from his
Memnonian nose. His opponent, yellow with rage,
retires from him, holding in one hand the wires
of a frail pink French umbrella: the weapon with