you get it from Egyptian banks, R. identified it at once, and thought it was all right. Then the police said that they could do nothing unless there were two witnesses to the deed who could "write European." This difficulty too was got over somehow, and the man was taken to prison; but they had not a vacancy in the prison, so they had to let him go. All R. could do was to dismiss him, and the next day he found he had been taken on in the Government office just opposite his own in the same administration. He went to see who had taken him on, and found that it was one of his own insubordinates, the Frenchman who came next to him in rank in his office. "All part of the same old farce," was R.'s comment.

If a man thieved too awfully in those days the Government dismissed him and gave him a much higher place in another department. A carpenter whom R. had discharged for stealing became an inspecting engineer. Every Egyptian wants to be an overseer, and thinks himself qualified to be an overseer in a business which he does not understand in the least. He does not see why an overseer should understand the business he is inspecting.

But one has heard something rather like this in England. We had a greengrocer and coal-merchant who, curiously enough, did not increase his income by going out as a waiter, in a second-hand suit of dress clothes too large for him, in the evening. Something went wrong in our flat on a Saturday night, and as I knew this greengrocer had been the foreman while the flats were building, I told the caretaker to go and fetch him to see if he knew how to put it right. "Bless you, sir, he doesn't understand anything about it," said the caretaker; "that wasn't his business, they had another foreman for that. But he is good with his fists, he is, and his job was to pick a quarrel with any workman who was giving trouble." He was a paid bully. The result is that the flats were very well built, and the proprietor recommended all his tenants to buy their coal (he did not mention the greengroceries-that would have been an infringement of the liberty of the subject) at the little shop

which the bully started on the opposite side of the Marylebone Road.

There is another side to the shield; the gratitude of the Egyptian is sometimes almost as embarrassing as his dishonesty. When Agenoria came home to the palace, which she had bought from the Pasha, she generally found somebody loafing about the garden with a couple of gazelles or a couple of flamingoes, or some turkeys. They dumped them down till the garden was a regular Zoo and would not hold

any more live stock. Gazelles were frequent; they are in the Zoo at Cairo now, all of them. These were from people who had deceived Cromwell Rhodes into doing some job for them-a form of conscience-money.

Even the animals become naïve in Egypt. Agenoria had one horse who, when he was put in the carriage, if the coachman left him, used to get tired of waiting and drag the carriage to the front door, and ring the bell with its mouth. This horse had a regular game with one of the dogs whenever it was loose. He would bite the dog's nose gently, and the dog would tear all round the garden and come back and have its nose bitten again, until one of them was wanted.

The visitors who go to the Fayum are always much interested in the basket-makers and crate-makers. You often see them working in the streets, and they seem to have four hands, because they are so handy with their toes. It is here that the baskets called mahteil or sambeel, according to their size, are made, in which the Egyptian transports the soil if he is excavating a temple or making a railway embankment. The Government departments use immense numbers of them, which are bought through middlemen, who make much more than the poor people who manufacture them. R. thought that he would like to break down this system, so he took his sleeping-car up to the Fayum and interviewed the people who made them, and endeavoured to place the orders for the railway department with them direct. But he failed absolutely; the basket-makers would have nothing to do with him, though he went and saw a

number of them in their houses. Whenever he entered a house every one, who could get into the room where he was, squeezed in; the rest filled up the doors and the windows. It was unimaginably hot. The Fayum is the only place in Egypt where the women make themselves really useful in their houses. When he left these suspicious people, who were too suspicious to see their own advantage, he went and watched a case which a judge was trying under a tree. A man had wounded his wife's hands with a knife, and then divorced her. Dogs came creeping up to see if there was anything to bite; fowls wandered by; the litigants had to sit still till all the other cases were finished, which took about two hours. The case they were going to try was, "Is it legally right for a man to wound his wife by accident?"