paper was called The Flight into Egypt. The new arrival at Shepheard's Hotel was the life of the English visitors still staying on in Cairo. Parties who had been living among the Beduin in the desert came back for a week at Shepheard's and were entranced with him and his hundred-horse-power car. The daughter of a Beyrout ship-chandler who had retired and built a house at Heliopolis was infatuated with him and tried to monopolize him at the dances. Incidentally we learned that his hotel expenses were five pounds a day. This interested me keenly, because at the same time I was living in ample comfort on exactly five shillings a day. I suppose, I don't know, for I've never had the money to try it--but I suppose there is a snap and a tang about a life that costs five pounds a day, which is irresistible to some souls. Or is it that the _cost_ of things never enters into these untrammelled people's heads at all? I wonder. "But for all my personal interest in that Italian article and the black ending in Bow Street and a sentence of three years, I appreciated the author's treatment of his subject. He made a short story of it in the manner of Flaubert, minute, vivid and grim. He showed the weekly dances wearing thin at the end of the season, the daughters of the Levantine ship-chandlers, and Greek tobacco merchants, and Maltese petty officials, looking rather bleak at the prospect of another barren summer in Alexandria, when a new planet suddenly swims into their ken, young, rich, handsome, fascinating. They wake up again and the fight begins. You can see the Italian journalist, small, dark, with a pointed beard, pointed shoes, and sharp points of light in his dark eyes, hovering on the edge of the dance or perhaps taking a turn with the Levantine lady, observant and urbane. Things go on like this for a week or so when, the P. and O. boat from Brindisi having arrived at Port Said the day before, two English strangers arrive at the hotel. There is a dance that evening. I don't suppose this was strictly true, but I can understand the artistic pleasure it would give the Italian journalist to make little changes like that in his story. You remember Sir Walter Scott's confessed passion for giving a story 'a new hat and stick.' Well, there was a dance that evening, let us say, and the ladies, tired of the eternal English officer who never intends to let matters come to a head; tired of the French Canal clerk with his little friend in Alexandria; tired, perhaps, even of the witty and urbane Italian journalist, who I imagine loved his _Genova la Superba_, his Chianti and the keen air and heavenly blue of his Ligurian Apennines far more than he did that flat Delta full of all the half-breeds of the world--the ladies waited expectantly for the return of their new inspiration from Heliopolis, where he was gone with a party in his hundred-horse-power car. They wait in vain. Later the party return, somewhat puzzled themselves, explaining