In Indiana every voter is required to "work the roads" or pay a road tax. Of late years, under intelligent direction, the highways have been vastly improved, but there was a time when "working the roads" was a large joke. To avoid paying the tax the farmer would have to go out with a team and do something to a public highway. Usually he selected a road which he would not traverse in going to town, and he would plough it up and "scrape" it into hollows and leave it looking like a sample of the Bad Lands of Montana. As soon as the tax was "worked out" he discontinued the improvement. After two or three days of "working," a fairly bad road could be made altogether impassable. If I were a military commander and had to execute a retreat and cut off any pursuit by a superior force I would have a corps of flat-headed township supervisors bring up the rear and "work" the roads. [Illustration: _Working out his taxes and improving the roads_] It was in this same town of Assiut that we visited one of the greatest bazaars in Egypt. We had heard about this bazaar every day since landing. The traveller who had been up the Nile and who had come back to Cairo, sunbaked and full of the patronising airs of the veteran, invariably said, "By the way, when you are in Assiut you must see the bazaar." He might as well have said, "When you are in Washington be sure to take a look at the Washington Monument." "Bazaar" has a seductive, Far Eastern sound, the same as "mosque." It is much luckier to shut your eyes and think of a mosque than to actually see a deserted lime kiln with an upturned sugar bowl on top of it. The same for "bazaar," only it goes double. A bazaar is a cosey corner gone wrong. If you will take the long corridor of an American second-class hotel, tear off the roof and substitute a canopy of tattered rag carpets, cover the walls with the imitation merchandise of a five and ten cent store, kick up a choking dust, turn loose twenty or thirty ripe odours and then have one hundred and fifty coffee-coloured lunatics all begin talking at the same time, you will have a rather tame imitation of the genuine Oriental bazaar as made famous in song and story. The crude articles sold in these bazaars, if displayed in the windows of a department store in America, would attract no attention whatever, but the tourist, as soon as he has had a touch of the Egyptian sun, seems to become easy and irresponsible, and he wants to bargain for everything in sight. It is a kind of temporary mania, known as curiosis, and is closely allied to the widely prevalent souveniria, or post card fever, which attacks even the young and innocent.