Or we may read the Best Companions, books full of honourable passions, wise moral and good pathos: reading maketh a full man, nobody will deny Bacon. Or we may easily get a musical instrument at little price. ‘Every schoolboy knows’ that music is a moral law which gives a soul to the universe. Criminals can be cured by the sweet power of music. The whale came up from the dark depths of the sea to carry the Greek musician because it was affected by the sweet harmonies which hold a mirror up to nature. Are we not better than the whale? Also gymnastic clubs are spread everywhere. Why do a youth not pass his leisure time in widdening his chest? Because a sound mind is in a sound body. Yet it is a physiological fact that the blacksmith cannot spend his leisure time in striking iron or the soldier in military exercises. The blacksmith may go to see the Egyptian Exhibition, and the soldier may go to the sea to practice swimming or to the mountains to know its caves in order that he may take shelter in time of war. Milton knew the best uses of leisure time. He used to sit to his books reading, and to his music playing, and so put his name among the immortals. That was the case of Byron, Napoleon, Addison, and Palmerstone. And if a man is unhappy, says an ancient philosopher, it is his own fault. He _can_ be happy if his leisure time brings profit and not disgrace. ‘The Diploma Class students are supposed to be four years in advance of my own, and, not being of the moneyed class, are more interested in passing their examinations with distinction. Also, since their careers as teachers of English depend on the continuance of the British military occupation, they take the morality of this regime more seriously than the University students, who are mostly the sons of pashas. These, with few exceptions, suffer from the bankruptcy of modern Egyptian life; they are able to take neither European culture nor their own Islamic traditions seriously. So far as I can make out from talking with the more intelligent of them, what Egypt asks for is a European government and education free of European political domination, but with a European technical personnel in the key positions, which it cannot do without and will pay highly for. Egypt can never be a great independent spiritual or political force in the Near East, but because of its wealth it can become at least the commercial centre of Islamic orthodoxy. Turkey is already a modern European country; Egypt will remain for some time yet eighteenth-century in spirit—a compromise between political romanticism and religious classicism. For a generation or two yet the descendants of the landowners enriched by European administration will continue to “spend their times in cafés longing for women,” and to be “perplexed and annoyed by the length of daytime,” while “the happy peasants” go on “toiling afar from the multitude of town life.” And my professional