was her spirit, and felt a strange calm come
over me, for I knew it was nothing to harm me.
When I could speak, I asked what troubled her.
She looked at me still — never changing that
cold fixed stare. Then I felt in my mind it
was her children, and I said:

"Harriet? Is it for your children you are
troubled?

No answer.

"Harriet," I continued, "if for these you
are troubled, be assured they shall never want
while I have power to help them. Rest in
peace!"

Still no answer.

I put up my hand to wipe from my forehead
the cold perspiration which had gathered there.
When I took my hand away from shading my eyes,
the figure was gone. I was alone on the bleak
snow-covered ground. The breeze, that had
been hushed before, breathed coolly and gratefully
on my face, and the cold stars glimmered
and sparkled sharply in the far blue heavens.
My dog crept up to me and furtively licked my
hand, as who should say, "Good master, don't
be angry, I have served you in all but this."

I took the children and brought them up
till they could help themselves.

OLD STORIES RE-TOLD.

THE MASSACRE OF THE MAMELUKES.

MOHAMMED ALI, born in Roumelia in 1769,
and raised to the pashalick of Egypt in 1805,
having in 1811 driven the Mamelukes, who were
in rebellion against him, into Nubia, far beyond
the first cataract, prevailed on five thousand of
the more peaceable of those warlike horsemen to
come to Cairo and settle there under his protection.
On the Koran, and by the sacred heads
of the two martyr brothers, Hassan and Hooseyn,
the favourite saints of the ancient city, the
great pasha had sworn to maintain Saim Bey
and his chiefs in all the posts of honour or
emolument of which they were possessed. The
Mamelukes had wasted their strength and
thinned their numbers by the fiery charges
which they had hurled against the dogged bayonets
of Mohammed Ali's Turks and Albanians,
from the Pyramids of Dagshoor to the shores
of Nile that look on Philæ, and began at last to
weary of open conflict.

Wily Mohammed's professed intention was to
unite all these turbulent men under the green
standard of the Prophet, and march against the
Wahabees, a reforming sect of Arabs that, ever
since 1750, had been the plague and vexation
of Egypt. For two years they had stopped the
pilgrim caravan from Damascus, and had
deprived the pashalick of all the honour and
benefit derivable from the annual pilgrimage to
Mecca. The new pasha, impatient of their
insolence, vowed their destruction, although he
had hitherto been compelled to temporise with
them. The Egyptians generally were eager for
the war, the Arnaout soldiers clamorous, the
Turks angrily anxious, Cairo impatient in any
way to get rid of both Turks and Arnaouts,
whose quarrels and scuffles were the torment of
the quieter citizens, the horror of the traders in
the bazaars, the detestation of the cook-shop
keepers. The dim shaded streets of the city
now echoed with the Albanian drum, the old
mosques resounded with the clash of the war-
cymbals. The great square of the Uzbeckeyh
was crowded with troops; droves of camels were
picketed in the plain below the cliff of the
citadel and in the desert towards Suez. The
half-naked dervishes shook their bamboo staffs,
and howled their exhortations in all parts of
the city to all true Moslems to march to the
redemption of Mecca.

The leader of the expedition was not to be Ibrahim,
the stepson of Mohammed Ali, who had
just driven the Mamelukes into Nubia, but the
pasha's favourite son, Tossoon Pasha, a chivalrous,
clever lad, only seventeen, who was the
idol of the wild soldiery. Tossoon, scarcely yet
strong enough to bear a coat of mail under a
desert sun, had been made governor of the
citadel in 1805, a pasha of two tails in 1809,
and, latterly, general-in-chief of the Mecca
expedition. Finati, an Italian, who served in the
Wahabee campaign, and has left an account of
it on record, gives a glowing report of the young
pasha, as kind, generous, affable, merciful, and
humane. While the bayonets are mustering at
Heliopolis, and the camels, clustered with
Albanians, are plodding from all parts of the country
towards the city of white tents, newly sprung
up under the palm-groves round Cairo, we must
peruse a back-page or two of Mohammed Ali's
history, without which the relationships of
this large-minded and subtle man cannot be
clearly understood.

The man who with a strong hand had
wrested the Nile and its borders from the
hands of the beys, was a native of Cavalea,
a small town of Roumelia, a district of Albania,
the Epirus of the Greeks, and the birth-
place of Pyrrhus. Losing his father in early
life, he was adopted by the governor of
Cavalea, who protected him, and trained him to
arms. His sagacity, vigilance, and daring soon
led to his being appointed, in a subordinate
way, as a collector of taxes — no sinecure in a
mountainous country, covered with woods of
cedar, oak, and chesnut, good for ambuscades,
and where every peasant is a hunter, a warrior,
and a hater of taxes. The young soldier had
no scruples. He had to collect the taxes, and
he did it quietly if he could; if not, roughly.

As it is not uncommon among the Turks to
unite the duties of a soldier with the pursuits
of a merchant, Mohammed became a dealer in
tobacco — a business which he appears to have
followed with considerable success, till the
invasion of Egypt by the French called him to
fulfil a higher destiny. The contingent of three
hundred men raised by the township of Cavalea
was placed under his command. Ali was
now decorated with the higher title of Bin-
Bashi, and recognised as a captain of regular
troops.