and vibrating and alluring, until you would fain don turban, kaftan, and slippers, and kneeling in the shadow of a cypress on the sun-flooded marble court of Omar, would be the mediator of those faiths, nor feel yourself a recreant Christian.

Once I heard the Muezzin cry from a little village on the edge of the desert, in the starlight before the dawn. It was only a wailing voice in the air. The spirits of the desert were addressed in their own language, or was it themselves lamenting, like water spirits to the green boughs overhanging them, that they could never know the gladness of the green world, but were forever demons and denizens of the desert? But the tones trembled away without echo or response into the starry solitude;-Al-lá-hu Ak-bar, Al-lá-hu Ak-bar!

So with songs and pictures, with musings, and the dinner of a Mecca pilgrim, passed the first evening upon the Nile. The Ibis clung to the bank at Boulak all that night. We called her Ibis because the sharp lateen sails are most like wings, and upon the Egyptian Nile was no winged thing of fairer fame. We prayed Osiris that the law of his religion might yet be enforced against winds and waves. For whoever killed an Ibis, by accident or willfully, necessarily suffered death.

The Lotus is a sweeter name, but consider all the Poets who have so baptized their boats! Besides, soothly saying, this Dahabieh of ours, hath no flower semblance, and is rather fat than fairy. The zealous have even called their craft Papyrus, but poverty has no law.

V.

The Crew.

We are not quite off, yet. Eastern life is leisurely. It has the long crane neck of enjoyment-and you, impatient reader, must leave your hasty habits, and no longer bolt your pleasure as you do your Tremont or Astor dinner, but taste it all the way down, as our turbaned friends do. Ask your dragoman casually, and he will regale you with choice instances of this happy habitude of the Orientals—or read the Arabian Nights in the original, or understand literally the romances that the Poets recite at the Cafés, and you will learn how much you are born to lose— being born as you were, an American, with no time to live.

Your Nile crew is a dozen Nondescripts. They are Arabs-Egyptians-Nubians and half-breeds of all kinds. They wear a white or red cap, and a long flowing garment which the Howadji naturally calls "Night-gown," but which they term "Zaaboot"-although as Mrs. Bull said, she thought Night-gown the better name. It is a convenient dress for river mariners, for they have only to throw it off, and are at once ready to leap into the stream

if the boat grounds-with no more incumbrance than Undine's uncle Kühleborn always had. On great occasions of reaching a town they wear the 'eree or drawers, and a turban of white cotton.

Our Reis was a placid little Nubian, with illimitable lips, and a round, soft eye. He was a feminine creature, and crept felinely about the boat on his little spongy feet, often sitting all day upon the bow, somnolently smoking his chibouque, and letting us run aground. He was a Hadji too; but, except that he did no work, seemed to have no especial respect from the crew. He put his finger in the dish with them, and fared no better. Had he been a burly brute, the savages would have feared him; and, with them, fear is the synonym of respect.

The grisly Ancient Mariner was the real captain—an old, gray Egyptian, who crouched all day long over the tiller, with a pipe in his mouth, and his firm eye fixed upon the river and the shore. He looked like a heap of ragged blankets, smoldering away internally, and emitting smoke at a chance orifice. But at evening he descended to the deck, took a cup of coffee, and chatted till midnight. As long as the wind held to the sail, he held to the tiller. The Ancient Mariner was the real worker of the Ibis, and never made faces at it, although the crew bemoaned often enough their hard fate. Of course, he tried to cheat at first, but when he felt the eye of the Pacha looking through him and turning up his little cunning, he tried it no more, or only spasmodically, at intervals, from habit.

Brawny, one-eyed Seyd was first officer, the leader of the working chorus and of the hard pulling and pushing. He had put out his own eye, like other Egyptians, many of whom did the same office to their children to escape Mohammad Alee's conscription. He was a good-natured, clumsy boor-a being in the ape stage of development. He proved the veracity of the "Vestiges," that we begin in a fishy state, and advance through the tailed and winged ones. "We have had fins, we may have wings." I doubt if Seyd had yet fairly taken in his tail—he was growing. Had I been a German naturalist, I should have seized the good Seyd and presented him to some "Durchlauchtiger," king or kaiser, as an ourang-outang from the white Nile; and I am sure the Teutons would have decreed it, a "sehr ausgezeichnete" specimen.

Seyd, I fear, was slightly sensual. He had ulterior views upon the kitchen drippings. While the Howadji dined, he sat like an ourang-outang, gazing with ludicrous intensity at the lickerous morsels, then shifted into some clumsier squat, so that the Howadji could not maintain becoming gravity. At times he imbibed cups of coffee privately in the kitchen regions, then gurgled his cocoanut nargileh with spasmodic vigor.

Seyd fulfilled other functions not strictly within his official walk. He washed the deck, brought coals to the chibouque, cleaned the knives and scraped kettles and pans. But after much watching, I feared that Seyd was going backward-developing the wrong way, for he became more baboonish and less human every day. His feet were in

credible. I had not seen the colossi then. Generally, he was barefooted. But sometimes, O goddess of Paris kids! he essayed slippers. Then no bemired camel ever extricated himself more ponderously pedaled. These leather cases, that might have been heir-looms of Memnon, were the completion of his full dress. Ah! Brummell! Seyd en grande tenue was a stately spectacle.

There was Saleh or Satan, a cross between the porcupine and the wild-cat, whom I disliked as devoutly as the Rev. Dr. Duck did the devil. And Aboo Seyd, a little old-maidish Bedoueen, who told wonderful stories to the crew and prayed endlessly. He was very vain and direfully ugly, short and speckled and squat. On the Nile I believed in necromancy, and knew Aboo Seyd to be really a tree-toad humanized. I speculated vainly upon his vanity. It was the only case where I never could suspect the secret.

Great gawky Abdallah then, God's favorite as his name imports, and a trusty mastiff of a man. Abdallah had few human characteristics, and was much quizzed by the crew under Satan's lead. He was invaluable for plunging among the grass and bushes, or into the water for pigeons which the Pacha had shot. And he loved his townsman Aboo Tar, or Congo, as we called him, as if his heart were as huge as his body. Congo was the youngest and brightest of the crew. He was black and slim, and although not graceful, moved rapidly and worked well. The little Congo was the only one of the crew who inspired human interest.