of seven years old, whom he had shut up in a stable naked, because he would not stay at some reforming kind of institution, to which he had been sent. The seven-year-old was saying, in the finest Egyptian declamatory style: "You may beat me, you may kill me, you may keep me here, you may give me nothing to eat, but I will not stay with those people." Agenoria not only admired his grit, but she told her servants once for all that she would not have any cruelty going on in her house. The father was so mad with rage that the other servants had to hold him to prevent him from attacking the boy again. On the next day, however, they were on duty quite placidly side by side. Ibrahim, the sevenyear-old, played at being all the other servants in turn: he had a sort of fancy dress and a prodigious white turban.

The one thing which kept him good was that he was not allowed to go out with the carriage if he had been naughty. The very first day that he had his clothes, Agenoria found him installed on the box beside the coachman, with his arms folded like an English footman-impossibly grand. Later on in the drive he relaxed a little, so as to take a large handkerchief, the first he had ever used, from his bosom. It was elaborately scented, and he used it for half an hour straight on end. The next morning he went to the housekeeper for another handkerchief. "But I gave you one yesterday," she said. "I know that, but Madame wouldn't like me to use the same scent again to-day."

The other servants used to hide behind the curtain so as to let him play at waiting. His great ambition, which he achieved by steady practice, was to be able to hand two vegetables at a time. He also took an extravagant interest in pouring out the liquors. While he was helping guests to whiskies-and-sodas his father used to call out "bas!"enough!-when he had poured out the proper amount of whisky. One day, at a luncheon, Agenoria was helping herself to some whisky. She took rather more than he had been taught to give, so he called out, " Bas! bas!" to her.

In one respect, Macaulay might have said of him what he said of Charles I., nothing in all his career became him so much

HELIOPOLIS, THE ATHENS OF THE ANCIENTS.

The avenue on the site of the city wall.

as the ending of it. For, when Agenoria and her husband had arranged to go to England and had refused to take him with them, they found him lying on a heap of sand outside the house, naked. "What are you doing, Ibrahim?" they asked, and he answered: "I shall have to do this in my village, so I had better get used to it." Was there ever a more histrionic appeal to the feelings?

Agenoria was stony-hearted, however; she knew the Egyptian's tricks far too well to want to have one in England. She had a narrow escape of having one all the same. For, long after they had settled in London, they had a letter from the stationmaster they had known in the country-near Alexandria. "You will be very sorry to hear my wife is dead. As you have no children, I am going to send you my eldest son." Agenoria kept up a lofty silence, trusting that he would not know where to send the boy to. Also that he would think it a waste of money unless she paid the boy's fare. It was this probably which saved her.

That station near Alexandria was rich in humorists; it was the terminus of a little bit of railway line, built to lead to the quarries, which never got to its destination. When Agenoria had been there a month or more she said to her cook, I suppose we shall want some coals soon?" The cook was a true Egyptian. "Why you want to buy coals," he said, "when I can go and take it from the engine? "But it isn't ours, Hassan." "Engineer not have coal?" he said with lofty scorn. "No; and when we get our coal in, you must carry back as much as you have taken, just as you brought it, a basketful at a time."

This might have been magnificent, but it was not the way to carry war into the camp of an Egyptian. He probably took the coal back, not to the engine, but to a friend who would sell it for him. The stationmaster always spoke of her as the princess. When they went to the station his form of salutation was: "All people see who is this coming. It is the Princess and Mr. Rhodes."

He was a man of nice discrimination in language. Speaking of two ladies, one of whom was very stout, and the

other had a fine figure, he said, with appropriate pantomimic gestures, "Lady fat down there not at all nice, but a little fat up here very nice, emphasising by adding to a lean native woman who was standing near, "You very thin, you like one bit o' wood."

This stationmaster was very proud of living in a twostoried house. He was always referring to his uppy-stairs window.

A coachman wrote a long petition to Agenoria, imploring her to give work to some relation of his whom she had never seen. "You ask Mr. R.," he said, "your marriad, English husband always do what his wife tell him."

While she was sitting at her window one day in Cairo, she she saw her next door neighbour's cook-man come out and seat himself on the curb-stone opposite. Presently he produced a beefsteak from the breast of his galabeah, looked about for a big stone, and pounded it on the curb in a place where goats passed by the thousand. She smiled when she thought how Sir John would enjoy the tenderness of that deceptive morceau.

She once had a Coptic servant. He left under exceptional circumstances. She had an Irish female cook, a very large person. She noticed that whenever the cook asked leave to have a bath in their bathroom, the Copt kept going to the back of the door, and, whenever anybody came past, used to knock to request instructions for this or the other thing. Her suspicions were aroused because he became so love-sick and ridiculous, and she discovered that there was a crack in the door.

Egyptian servants are very clever when they are tiny, but by the time that they are sixteen they are almost imbecile. Sometimes they recover. She was glad that she only knew Ibrahim in his interesting stage; he was so very magnificent. On her at-home days he stood outside the door with his arms crossed, from three o'clock till the last guest had departed, as if the whole thing depended on it. Nothing gave him greater pride than answering the door. The moment he heard a

ring he flew to it, but, if the caller only wanted to ask a