firewood," and ended with a flourishing yelp from
Jip.

"He seems to be finishing for the season,
giving a last performance," said the lady; and
then she thanked me again and again for the
good news I had brought her, and bade me
good-by with an appearance of reviving hope.

On a day in November, a day of sullen gloom,
I again sought the home of the lady and the
bird. I was the bearer of sorrowful news, but
my sad errand could not wait. It must be
done, though it was a bitter duty. I must tell
her, so near the angel world, that her beloved
husband had gone before, and would meet her
there. He had been my dear friend, but I
counted my sorrow as nothing. Her mother met
me, and I saw, by her grave sad mien, that I had
hard news to hear, as well as to communicate.

"Her babies—our babies—are orphans," said
the mother.

The beautiful lady and the brave husband
were both in the better land, and the bright bird
was dead too. This little sad romance of the time
had so died out in an ordinary London street.

    The song was o'er, the last sweet note
    Upon the air had ceased to float,
    The life that thrilled in melody,
    With his wild music passed away.
    He longed for fragrance, flowers, and light,
    His heart had broken in the night.

THE INDIRECT ROUTE.

MOST people, unless good or ill fortune has
placed them at one or other end of the social
ladder, know tolerably well the feelings attendant
on the termination of a holiday. Whether
we have been welcoming hard work and braving
broken bones on the High Alps, or offering
passive resistance to diphtheria and scarlet
fever at some sea-side sanatorium, Black Monday
comes even as it did of old, and we poor
straws are sucked out of still pool or playful
eddy into the straight onward current of working
life. In few places can this contrast be felt
more vividly than on landing at Boulah from a
Nile voyage. The daily and weekly course
"through hushed old Egypt and its sands," is
of so easy and undomestic a character as to
foster a brief and pleasant oblivion of daily
papers and weekly bills. The postman, though
you do hear his bell in the calm evening as he
carries his bag on foot from Cairo to the
Cataracts, calls not at your door, and there is no
object to carry your thoughts beyond the narrow
precincts of the dahabeeh, except the problematic
hippopotamus for whom you look among
the castor-oil thickets but never see, the crocodile
whom you do see but never hit, or, if you
do, it doesn't hurt him, and the never-failing
robber tribe on the east bank, who are always
hovering for prey, but who never attack you,
even when you land in double-barrelled dignity
to examine the rock tombs of Beni Hassan,
and learn how that opera-dancers pirouetted
with horizontal legs before Abimelek, and ladies
of the court played football in white Balmoral
boots with blue laces. All this, however, must
come to an end; and when, after a last gaze at
the awful mass of the Pyramids, a farewell to
the giant Sphinx beautiful in spite of mutilation,
and a pitying look at Ramses the Second, as
he lies placidly smiling in a mud-hole till he
shall be promoted to a glass-case in the portico
of the British Museum, we drop down the
stream towards Cairo, beginning to feel a
forecast of the actual world.

Hardly may we, as our donkeys pass through
the city gate, cast a single mental stepping-
stone into the gulf of two thousand years by
looking out for the spot where Bedreddin
Hassan was found asleep in scanty costume, ere
the door of Shepherd's Hotel is undone, and we
are at once in the full tide of London population.
The hotel is in a high state of activity.
The lamps are more numerous and bright than
when last seen, the Nubian waiters' shirts are
whiter, their skins—by contrast at least—shine
blacker, the staircases are choked with
portmanteaus and folding arm-chairs. The overland
passengers have arrived; and at once the mere
pleasure-tourist sinks into insignificance, the
like whereof he has not for some months known.
In Upper Egypt he has been a sort of petty
king, a Roi Fainéant like enough, with a maire
de palais in the guise of a dragoman, but still a
monarch, supported, moreover, in right (and
wrong, too, often) by Turkish pashas not
impervious to the influences of champagne. But
now, when his sole connexion with Arabia is the
Arabic numeral which marks his identity in a
bustling hotel, he becomes wondrous small. The
mighty stream which periodically bears outward
numbers of active youths, and returns charged
with limp ladies and flexible children, is all
important. Their time is limited, their places are
booked through, and the best and quickest means
of transit belong of right to them. The railway
may now probably have made some difference in
the state of matters, but in the time to which
these pages refer, he who had hedged aside from
the direct forthright found the entered tide not
only leave him hindmost, but continue to flow so
strongly as to render his chance of getting in
again very small.

To drop metaphor, all we wanted was a
passage from Cairo to Alexandria, and this it was
by no means easy to obtain. Our party was
increased in number by several Indian officers,
civilians, and others; and these, having
overstayed the time allotted, had lost their privileges,
and were powerless as ourselves. Steamer after
steamer came in, but so did caravan after caravan
of Suez passengers, the desert telegraph's cry
was still "They come," and the clerks gave little
hope but that, even if we stayed a fortnight, a
similar result would ensue. A vaguely-expressed
promise of a possible steamer in a few days lured
us to stay, and Cairo, after all, offers amusement
enough for even a longer period. The obelisk
of Heliopolis, where the bees, like the Christians
of Upper Egypt, have filled the hieroglyphic