The _Nile Notes of a Howadji_ describes the four weeks’ flight of the ‘Ibis’ up the river to Aboo Simbel, and the ‘course of temples’ on the return voyage. It is a book of impressions and rhapsodies, a glowing record of travel in which realism struggles with poetry and is usually worsted. It is a dream of the Orient, delightfully parsimonious as to improving facts, and prodigal of whatever helps the home-keeping reader to comprehend the witchery and fascination of the East. A few timid souls were disturbed by ‘Fair Frailty’ and ‘Kushuk Arnem,’ which seem innocent enough now, but the timid souls no doubt found peace in other chapters, such as ‘Under the Palms.’ _The Howadji in Syria_ continues the record. The conditions are changed. Instead of the dahabieh, the camel; for the Ibis was substituted MacWhirter, whose exertions in trotting ‘shook my soul within me;’ for the mud villages and mysterious temples of the Nile, Jerusalem, Acre, Damascus. The temper of the book differs from that of its predecessor. In this volume Curtis is poetical, in the other he was a poet. The mocking American note is heard, as when the Howadji says ‘a storm besieged us in Nablous and a fellow Christian of the Armenian persuasion secured us for his fleas, during the time we remained.’ The Howadji has evidently undergone a measure of disenchantment. The wonders of the East are less wonderful because less vague. In Egypt there was intoxication, in Palestine and Syria there is curiosity, mingled with amusement and contempt. The characteristic quality of the second Howadji book is to be found in the descriptions of the cafés, the bazaars, and in that most excellent account of the Turkish bath (‘Uncle Kühleborn’), quite the best thing of the kind that has been written. _Lotus-Eating_ is a series of journalistic letters on the Hudson, Trenton Falls, Niagara, Saratoga, Newport, and Nahant, when Nahant was ‘a shower of little brown cottages fallen upon the rocky promontory that terminates Lynn beach.’ Not in this wise do young men now write for newspapers, with ornate periods and quotations from Waller and Herrick. The book abounds in happy characterizations. At Saratoga ‘we discriminate the arctic and antarctic Bostonians, fair, still, stately, with a vein of scorn in their Saratoga enjoyment, and the languid, cordial, and careless Southerners, far from precise in dress or style, but balmy in manner as a bland Southern morning. We mark the crisp courtesy of the New Yorker, elegant in dress, exclusive in association, a pallid ghost of Paris--without its easy elegance, its _bonhomie_, its gracious _savoir faire_, without the _spirituel_ sparkle of its conversation, and its natural and elastic grace of style.’ And so it runs on.