on the fourth of the following month?
She must not detain the canal boats, which
are to take her mails and passengers down to
Cairo; or the camels and four-horse-carriages
which are to effect their exodus out of Egypt
—an hour. Another panting steamer will be
waiting at the head of the Bed Sea at Suez,
and must steam off, bag and baggage, on the
seventh, to the various ports between Egypt
and China.*

* The number of miles travelled by the Company's
steamers during the year 1851, was 589,842, equal to more
than twenty-three times the circumference of the globe, and
equal also to 1,616 miles per day. During every minute of
that year, an average of one mile and one-eighth of a mile
was traversed by the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation
Company's steam power.

.Bump! We are alongside the Bentinck.
Her port is crowded. Every hand is stretched
forth to catch the first clutchable object out
of the tiny tender, and to drag it into the
ship. Things are hauled over one another,
like lumps shot up out of a volcano. A black
trunk, a black nurse, a couple of mail boxes,
a little boy, a birdcage, two or three more
mail boxes, a military officer, a supply of fish,
mail boxes again, a dressing-case, a young
lady, several baskets of ice, a bundle of hat-
boxes, a petty officer— the deck of the small
vessel is cleared in no time, and every object,
animate and inanimate, is mixed up and
jumbled together upon the gangway.† The
bustle is intense. Everything, including boxes
of specie, seems endowed with locomotive
power; and I am the more struck with the
calm unconcern of my ringletted friend. I
espy her at her cabin window, behind a jar
of beautiful flowers, reading, with the settled,
unruffled air of having lived there for the last
twelvemonth. I am torn from contemplating
her longer, by being made into a sandwich
(between a huge bread-basket and a bag of
biscuits), and gulped into the Bentinck, to be
digested at leisure.

† The number of packages—independent of passengers'
personal luggage, and the Government mails—shipped to
the various ports between Southampton and Hong-Kong,
by this Company, in 1850, was twenty-five thousand six
hundred. The number of passengers, in the same year, was
nearly twenty thousand— thirteen thousand of whom were
deck passengers, chiefly going to and fro on the Black Sea,
or between the northern and southern ports of Spain— mostly
labourers in harvest time.

Suddenly, every hand in the ship is struck
motionless; but every pair of legs runs as
fast as it can to the quarter-deck. Two small
elegant steamers have been reported within
hail; and, above the second, the royal standard
is displayed. The Queen is coming! She is
on her way from Osborne.

The bright little Fairy trips along over the
waves in the dazzling clear sunshine, and
alters her course to pass close under us. The
starboard bulwark of the Bentinck is beaded
with passengers' heads. " Away aloft! " is
the word. The ship's company dance into
the shrouds, and stick to them;—a swarm
of blue-bottles. " Dip the colours! " The
bunting makes its bow; for the Fairy is close
under us— a charming little moving picture:—
Two men, with a Lieutenant in the fullest
fig, at the wheel. A Lady in black seated at the
cabin-door; two children beside her, looking
at us with eager curiosity; the Captain, cocked
hat in hand, explaining all about us. Three
dips of a parasol is the greeting from the Fairy,
and three clear, distinct, hearty English cheers
are returned from the Bentinck.

In another minute, hardly without knowing
it, I find myself again on the deck of the little
tender. Two ladies are weeping beside me.
An old man with white hair is waving one
hand to a handsome cadet, and covering his
eyes with the other. We move away. I am
roused by more cheering, as the paddles of
the Bentinck revolve. Good speed to her, and
three times three!

THE MAN FROM THE WEST.

IT is part of the popular belief in Egypt,
that wickedness and wisdom are indigenous
in the West— the country of the setting sun.
But by the West, or Maghreb, they do not
understand any of the European states,
confining the signification of the word to the long
series of provinces and kingdoms extending
from the limits of their own valley along
the northern coast of Africa, even to the Sea
of Darkness, or the Atlantic Ocean. Whenever,
in their fictitious narratives, they wish
to introduce a Magician— a character answering
to the villain of our dramas and romances
—they almost invariably derive him from
Tripoli, Fez or Morocco, and having stated
his origin, think themselves at liberty to
invest him with any amount of power and
atrocity required for the development of their
plot.

The word Maghrebi, or Man from the
West, after some time of residence in the East,
became identified, even in my foreign mind,
with the idea of peculiar sagacity and
unscrupulousness. Whenever I saw a sallow, heavy-
featured Western, I felt a mingled sensation
of awe and curiosity; and I looked out
eagerly for an opportunity of making the
acquaintance of one of those terrible individuals.
Fortune favoured me, for one day that I was
sitting enjoying a shisheh in the shop of
Hanna, the Levantine mercer, and chatting
with some closely-veiled women, who were
idly bargaining for muslins and silks, a sonorous
salaam attracted my attention, and the
tall form of an unmistakeable Maghrebi
darkened the door,

Hauna knew his customer at once, and
greeted him with profuse salutations. From
what he said, indeed, it was evident that he
had expected an earlier visit; and he
professed, with some affectation, to have been
quite uneasy about the safety of his old
friend. This meant that the business relations
between them had always been satisfactory;
in other words, that the said Hanna had been
accustomed to make at least five per cent.
over and above a fair profit in the sales he
effected to the (supposed) terrible Maghrebi.