and his words. Like a Queen's idiot boy, he has the air of royalty.

Nor does the Oriental fail in dignity and repose. His appearance satisfies your imagination no less than your eye. No other race has his beauty of countenance, and grace of costume; nowhere else is poetry the language of trade. His gravity becomes tragic, then, when it seems to you a vague consciousness of inadequacy to his position, the wise silence of a witless man.

-We have, then, a common mother, and the silence of the Western is kin to that of the Eastern sky.

Have we sailed so far, Pacha, to stand in the balcony looking over the Arabian metropolis, and smiling with the Prophet at its splendor and opulence, to discover that our musings are the same as in the crest of a primeval pine, or on the solitary mound of a Prairie?

"The camels are ready-"

"Yes, Commander, and so are the Howadji."

The sun was nearing the Pyramids, and doubly beautiful in the afternoon, "the delight of the imagination" lay silent before us, a superb slave, compelling our admiration. I lingered and lingered upon the little balcony. Ha-ha, said the donkey-boys beneath, and I leaned over and saw a Hareem trotting along. The camels lay under the trees, and a turbaned group, like the wise men at the manger, in old pictures, awaited our departure with languid curiosity.

The Pacha descended the stairs and I followed him, just as the Commander announced for the twelfth time"The camels are ready."

II.

Departure.

THE camels lay patiently under the trees before the door, quietly ruminating. Our caravan consisted of seven, four of which had been loaded and sent forward with their drivers, and were to halt at a village beyond the city, the other three awaited the pleasure of the Howadji and the Commander.

If the mystery of the desert had inspired any terror in our minds, surely the Commander presented at that moment ample consolation.

For several days before our departure the astute Mohammad had indulged in stories of desert dangers, and when he conceived that our minds were sufficiently exercised, he began his overtures for the purchase of swords, guns, pistols, and weapons of all kinds and calibres, to secure us against the perils of the wilderness. The Pacha had brought a gun from Malta, and Nero had bequeathed me a pie-knife, of goodly strength and size, which had done admirable execution upon the pigeon-pasties of the Nile, for which the gun had furnished the material.

This was the sum of our arsenal, and in consideration

of the fact that we should hardly be attacked by any force whose numbers would not insure victory, it seemed useless to provide more.

But the alarmed Commander having testified that there was but one God, and that Mohammed was his prophet, farther testified that one gun and a pie-knife were flagrantly insufficient against the Bedoueen of the Desert. The Howadji, therefore, yielded, and the Commander having increased my store by a pair of English pocket-pistols, gave me a bag of bullets which I placed at the bottom of my portmanteau, and a box of percussion caps which I requested him to carry.

So we descended, armed for the desert.

The Pacha carried his gun, and I was girded over the shoulder with a strap holding the pistols; but it was so inconveniently short, that my left arm could hardly hang straight. We wore upon our heads, wide-awakes or slouched beavers, wreathed with a heavy fold of linen, which "the opulent strangers" had been assured was the work of Persian looms, and misgiving that the sun would be more formidable than the Bedoueen, I concealed a pair of blue wire-gauze goggles in my pocket.

For the rest, we differed little from any gentlemen mounting their horses for an evening ride. But the Commander was a spectacle.

He was a walking arsenal. The mild Muslim was swathed in steel bandages of cutlasses, knives of various sanguinary devices, and shining tubes of pistols. The belts of these weapons entangled him in crimson net`work, and even had the scabbards of the swords and dag

gers not been cased in leather and inextricably knotted to their handles, so that in no extremity of peril could he ever have drawn a blade-yet he was so burthened and bound that he could neither have wielded a weapon nor have run away. As the latter was the Commander's great military movement, I was as much perplexed as concerned at his appearance, until I reflected that he would conduct his retreat and escape with his many machines of war upon the back of his camel.

I confess a certain degree of satisfaction in the contemplation of this array of defensive appliances. In a sudden crisis it seemed only necessary that all parties should rush upon the Commander, as roused soldiers to their stacks of arms, and liberally furnished from his exhaustless stores, give endless battle to any foe.

He was a diamond edition of the Turkish army. It were unfair to suppose that he had not adjusted his means to his conscious power, and what onslaughts and carnage were implied in his appearance! What unfought Marathons and symbolical sieges of Troy were moving, in his awful accoutrements, around the court of Shepherd's Hotel! Regarding the air of the movement, you would have sworn a union of Ajax and Achilleslooking in the eye, you would have owned Ulysses, but surveying the surprising whole, nothing less than impregnable Troy and all catapultic Greece had satisfied your fancy.

-It was time to mount, and the farewells must be spoken.

You, Nera, have not forgotten that last Cairene after

B

noon, nor the sorrow that the charmed evenings of the Nile were not to be renewed upon the desert, nor the warm wishes, that like gentle gales, should waft your barque to Greece. Neither have the Howadji lost from memory the figure that stood in the great sunny door, waving a slow hand of farewell, nor the eyes that looked, not without haziness and tearful mist, toward the uncertainty of the desert.

Addio, Nera!—

With the words trembling upon my tongue, and half looking back and muttering last words, I laid my left hand carelessly upon the back of the recumbent camel to throw myself leisurely into the seat.

I had seen camels constantly for two months, and had condemned them as the slowest and most conceited of brutes. I had supposed an elephantine languor in every motion, and had anticipated a luxurious cradling over the desert in their rocking gait, for to the exoteric eye their movement is imaged by the lazy swell of Sum

mer waves.

The saddle is a wooden frame, with a small upright stake, both in front and behind. Between these stakes and upon the frame, are laid the blankets, carpets, and other woolen conveniences for riding. Over all is thrown the brilliant Persian rug. The true method of mounting is to grasp the stakes in each hand, and to swing yourself rapidly and suddenly into the seat, while the camel driver-if you are luxurious and timid-holds his foot upon the bent fore-knee of the camel. Once in the seat you must cling closely, through the three convulsive