foe, so, upon these wild sands, instinctive nature seems to aim at appeasing the hereditary enemy, by the beautiful persuasion of art. These tombs are of the finest oriental architecture. They hold the ashes of Sultans and Caliphs whose names are remembered by nothing else. They are mosques no less than tombs, and travellers leaving or entering the city, pause in them to pray.

But their austerity is unrelieved by the gladness of any green thing. Over our western graves we love the sweet consolations of Nature; and the year, changing from flower to fading leaf, in gracious imagery renews for ever the mystery of life, and with almost human sympathy, insists upon immortality. But the changeless year glides unsympathising over Arabian graves. He is doubly dead, who is buried in the desert.

As we advanced, we saw more plainly the blank sand that overspread the earth, from us to the eastern horizon. Out of its illimitable reaches paced strings of camels, with swarthy Arabs. Single horsemen, and parties upon donkeys, ambled quietly by. The huge white plaster palace, which Abbas Pacha was building upon the edge of the desert, swarmed with workmen, and his army of boys was encamped upon the sand beyond. Our path lay northward, along the line where the greenness of

the Nile valley blends with the desert. There was a little scant shrubbery upon the sides of the way --groves of Mimosa, through which stretched the light sand, almost like a road; and towards the west lay the gardens of Shoobra, a summer palace of Mohammad Alee, palm-fringed along the shore.

As the sun set, I turned upon my camel, and saw Grand Cairo for the last time.

One summer day, in Switzerland, as I climbed the Faulhorn, I saw suddenly in a dark tarn below me, the unbroken image of the snow-summited Wetterhorn, which was miles away, beyond the valley of Grindelwald. Every point of each solitary snow-spire glittered entire, and the tarn was filled with the majestic apparition. So lay the vision of cathedral sublimity, pure, perfect and impossible, in the mind of Michael Angelo.

But here the dream of a different genius was made visible. If that was grand and austere, how exquisite was this! The delicate grace of the grove of minarets clustering in the glowing sunset revealed the image of an Eastern Poet's mind, and the voice of the Muezzin that vibrated to our ears and died in a tranquil heaven, touched them as tenderly as the aerial outline struck the eye.

Many an evening I had floated upon the Lagoons of Venice, homeward from the Lido. But the

rocking gondola that bore me to the feet of the Queen of the Adriatic is not more passionately remembered than the swaying camel, that at the same moment of the day bore me away from "the mother of the world."

A lofty obelisk rose between us and the west. Our eyes clung to it in passing, for it marked the site of Heliopolis the magnificent, the city of the sun. Plato went to school there and Moses, and thither came Joseph bringing the young child and his mother. It is a mass of sand mounds now, and a few inarticulate stone relics. But in its midst lies a pleasant garden, whose flowers wave around the base of the great obelisk on which the hieroglyphics are covered by the cells of wild bees.

At Heliopolis, also, the phenix built its funeral pyre, and rose from the Medean alchemy" of its

own ashes.

Yet in that moment, plodding along on the top of the camel, I turned and gazed at Heliopolis very tranquilly. I have looked with as much excitement at King Philip's Mount Hope, as I sailed down Narragansett Bay. This tranquillity, however, was not indifference, or satiety, or ignorance. I was conscious that the place and the moment, the memories and anticipations with which my life. was overflowing in that sunset had acclimated me

to this height of interest, so that I breathed its air naturally.

Nothing could have really surprised Ixion after the first draught of nectar. That gave him, in a goblet, the freedom of heaven. A man who has sailed for two months upon the Nile encounters the desert with an emotion none the less profound because it is placid.

Eastern enthusiasm is undoubtedly suspected. The filth, fanaticism, and inconvenience of the East are not to be denied, nor the alarming proportion of vermin to people in oriental cities. Therefore, whoever sees in a mosque only red and white plaster, or in the Parthenon but a mass of broken marble, should not expose himself to the trouble of contemplating those objects. There are prints of them engraved with restored proportions—a travelling and thinking made easy, much preferable to the ocular experience of those agile travellers who overrun all Europe in three months.

When once you are admitted ad eundem in that enthusiasm, however, you will readily forgive the suspicion of all under-graduates. Looking at the East through your experience, and confessing that

we want from Nature but the first few primitive notes; in us lies the true melody with its endless variations,”—you will bear with the most judicious

doubts and the most sensible shrugs, as the astronomer, stealing through his telescope the secrets of the moon, tolerates the plain common sense which asserts that it is all green cheese.

I remember when Tadpole came home from Italy. He seemed to me like one who had basked in the latest smile of my absent mistress. absent mistress. I greeted him

as poor Arabs in a desert village greet the Hadji or Pilgrim who returns from Mecca, and has seen the Prophet's tomb and the holy stone. On the most

Italian of June evenings we strolled together in the moonlight, and renewed in our words the romance of the South.

He listened courteously and quietly. I loved his silence, in which I perceived the repose of May days in Naples. The smoke curled languidly from his cigar, and we heard the beat of oars upon the tranquil bay.

"Yes," he said, at last, "I know-it was certainly so. But frankly-do you not think the fleas balance the fascination ?"

Tadpole has the reputation and privilege of a travelled man. He brought shell necklaces from Venice, and corals from Naples, and scarfs from Rome-but, for all that, he has never been in Italy.