caged in his arsenal, that rattled mockingly around him, violently shaking, and with a piteous look of despair upon his face, which betrayed his consciousness of helplessness, and that he, the arsenal, and all the trappings were slowly slipping off toward the tail.

"O gentlemen!" he gasped in irregular syllables, as Pomegranate inexorably advanced.

"Stop him, Mohammad!" cried the Pacha.

"Oh-damn!—non è possibile,” shook out the Muslim Pickwick, as he clattered up in the rear.

Pomegranate, intent upon revenging in Mohammad's person all that camels have ever suffered from men, would not stop as he reached us, but pushed sternly on.

"Oh! gentlemen," groaned Golden Sleeve, as he slowly and inevitably slid toward the tail of his beast.

But the gentlemen were faint with laughter, and the delicious eyes of Khadra swam with delight at the spectacle.

The crisis came. Weeping bitterly and grasping at the carpets upon which he sat, and which were slipping with him, down upon the desert he sank, a promiscuous heap of man, weapons, cloaks, carpets, water bottles, and blankets, and there he sat with legs outstretched, the toes of his red slippers curved up at the sky, and wofully staring back upon the Howadji and the Armenians, who, ready to fall from their own camels with excess of laughter, hurried to the rescue.

We came up, and the Commander did not move. He sat upon the ground pouring out terrific Arabic oaths, yet more in sorrow than in anger. For with the air of a

man irretrievably injured, and not deigning us a solitary glance, he piled Pomegranate again with carpets, and went forward once more with melancholy resignation, to the other vicissitudes of life.

XV.

Aduenture.

My reader is not heroic, perhaps, and has not clung to MacWhirter, but is listlessly turning these pages to strike upon the story of adventures, even as the news-boy in the pit of the Chatham, falls asleep at the opening of the play in which Mr. Kirby performs, but with the strictest injunction to his companion to be awakened at the crisis in the fifth act," Because I want to see him die; for Billy Kirby dies prime."

What is a desert journey without adventures? And what does the arsenal that envelopes the Commander, imply?

Often we seemed to be on the verge of adventure. At certain spots when evening fell, and the camp was pitched, the sage Commander scanned the desert suspiciously, and looked solemnly at the Howadji, whispering with many shrugs, that this especial spot was a haunt for "bad people!" And as, uniformly, after such intimations, and after dark, a group of men appeared and offered to mount guard over us all night, for a consideration, it became clear, from the result, that it was only a simple conspiracy to extort money.

On such occasions our Shekh was summoned and informed in council that we had contracted that he should pay all tolls, that for our own parts we wished no guard, and should certainly pay for none, and that if any illadvised Bedoueen undertook to compel payment, the consequences (and here the Pacha clicked the lock of the one-barrel, and I handled my pistols abstractedly) were not upon our consciences.

This affable treatment of prospective danger was always successful. The danger remained prospective. There was a larger group about the fire those nights, and in the morning the Howadji were told, as if to awaken remorse, that after guarding us all night, the men had retired, after the Shekh had paid them,--and in a vague tone, like an appendix, it was remarked, that the Shekh had no superfluous funds for such purposes. The obdurate Howadji always smiled and answered that they were glad the Shekh had so dutifully fulfilled his contract.

It is impossible, however, not to feel upon the desert that you are completely at the mercy of the Arabs. The feeling does not rise into apprehension, because, like animals, they do not fully comprehend the fact themselves, and because their ignorance of possible consequences makes those consequences more appalling to their fancy. They are, too, naturally peaceable.

Yet as a man who had been always protected by law, whose life was never fairly committed to his own keeping, I wondered, with some desire, whether we were not to have an adventure. As every man for the first time going to sea, hopes for a storm, as if otherwise, he could

not know the true majesty of the ocean, so, abandoned to the desert, I half wished to make the sense of that abandonment real, by the wild lawlessness of a skirmish.

I say half-wished because, however strong may be your spirit of adventure, if you are not a savage or a brute, the chances of killing or being killed, to gratify a whim, are not fascinating. Seen on the pages of books by warm fires, a cloud of dust on the horizon, and the ringing bound of armed men seeking to do battle with yourself and your party, are agreeable and exciting.

And I found in Cairo, at Shepherd's dinner-table, bands of brave gentlemen on their way from the interior of English counting-houses to similar retreats in India, who regretted extremely that time did not permit them "to run into the desert and have a crack at the Arabs.” I was sorry for them, but have been since comforted by hearing that brave men have always time and chance for bravery.

The genuine excitement of danger, and the heroic impatience of social conventions that tend to personal effeminacy are very intelligible, and I know the exulting leap of the heart with which a man steps beyond the charmed circle of legal protection, and relying upon his own right arm, longs

"To drink delight of battle with his peers."

But desert fighting is, at best, only shooting robbers. Your tent is a chamber, and the marauding Arab a burglar, and you shoot him simply that he may not shoot you, or steal your purse. The Pacha, indeed, indulged a