I can always amuse myself for days in watching the trading in the bazaars. I saw an Egyptian woman buying some meat to-day. The butcher’s whole stock consisted of a couple of sheep, one of which hung from a nail on the wall. The woman drew her finger nail along the piece she wished to take home, and the butcher sawed it off with a clasp knife. He weighed it on a pair of rude scales, and the woman objected, saying that he had given her too much. He then took one end of the strip of meat in his hand, and putting the other end in his mouth, severed it by drawing the knife quickly across it. He handed the piece he had held in his mouth to the woman, who took it and paid for it, evidently seeing nothing out of the way in his methods. In the bazaars the merchants sit in little booths no bigger than the packing-box of a piano. A ledge about two feet high, and of about the same width, runs along the front of the store, on which the customers sit. A purchaser is usually offered coffee, and asked to take a smoke out of the long-stemmed water pipe of the proprietor. It takes a great time to make a deal, for the Mohammedan always asks three times what he expects to get, and never comes down without bargaining. The better merchants all keep book accounts, which they foot up in Arabic characters, taking the ink out of a brass inkstand with a handle a foot long which is so made that it will contain the pen as well as the ink. This inkwell is thrust into the belt of the gown when the proprietor leaves his shop. If one is not satisfied at one place he can go to another. In the Cinnamon Bazaar there are dozens of stores that sell nothing but spices, and in the Shoemakers’ Bazaar are the gorgeously embroidered slippers and red-leather shoes, turned up at the toes, worn by all good Mohammedans. In the Silver Bazaar the jewellers are at work. They use no tools of modern invention. Their bellows is a bag of goatskin with a piece of gun-barrel for the mouth and two sticks like those used for the ordinary fire bellows at the end. One’s only guarantee of getting a good article is to buy the silver, have it tested by the government assayer, and let the jeweller make it up under his own eyes. Poor jewellery is often sold, and I remember buying a silver bracelet for a friend during a visit to Cairo which looked very pretty and very barbaric, but six months after its presentation it began to change colour, and proved to be brass washed with silver.