pouring floods of light and gladness about him, as he pours floods of life into his veins. The sunshine without has created a kind of sunshine within. It has saved him from working in slushy snow, and in wet ditches, and from all unpleasant skyey influences. It has given him plenty of fête-days and holidays. It has made his muscles springy, his joints supple, his step light, his eye and wits and tongue quick. As to the rest, he might almost think that he had no master over him. He works when and how he pleases. Still he is not without his troubles. The Khedivé, and his people, will take all that his land produces, except the doura, the maize, the cucumbers, and the onions that will be barely sufficient to keep himself and his family alive. All the wheat and the beans must go. And he will get bastinadoed into the bargain. But about that he doesn’t trouble himself much. It always was so, and always will be so. Besides, is it not Allah’s will? After all his wants are not great. He scarcely requires house, fuel, or clothing. And to-day Achmed’s donkey has been hired by the howaji, from whom he hopes to extort two rupees. Two piastres would be plenty, but he wants the rupees particularly just now, for he has a scheme for divorcing his present wife, as she is getting rather old for him, and marrying a young girl he knows of in the village; and this, one way or another, will cost him two or three pounds. And so he is more smiling, and more attentive to the howaji, than usual. There is however, one point of resemblance: they both end the day in the same fashion. They light their pipes, and take their kêf. Achmed, at these times, appears to be breathing a purer and less earthly ether than Hodge; but that is his manner. It may be that his thoughts are less of the grosser things of earth, the first wants of life, than Hodge’s. But who knows? Perhaps they may be only of divorcing the old wife, and fetching home the young one. Hodge, I believe, has the greater sense of enjoyment as the soothing narcotic permeates his hard overstrained fibres. Sometimes there is a half-formed thought in his mind that he is doing his duty manfully, without much earthly notice or encouragement.