The women turned pale and some said, “At last! At last!” while others got faint in the head, and some fell on the bosoms of their husbands and said: “Don't shoot!” You see, most of these wives had husbands somewhere else that might be looking for them. I have warned dad not to be seen conversing with a woman, or he may be shot by a husband who is on her trail, or by the husband she has with her. Well, sir, of all the trips we have had anywhere, the trip from Constantinople here was the limit. For two or three days we were on dinky steamboats with Arabs, Turks, negroes and all nationalities camping on deck, full of fleas, and with cholera germs on them big enough to pick like blueberries, and all of the passengers were dirty and eat things that would make a dog in America go mad. The dog biscuit that are fed to American dogs would pass as a delicate confection on the menu of any steamboat we struck, and I had rather lie down in a barn yard with a wet dog for a pillow and a cast-off blanket from a smallpox hospital for a bed, than to occupy the bridal chamber of any steamboat we struck. And then the ride across the desert by rail to reach Cairo was the worst in the world. Passengers in rags, going to Mecca, or some other place of worship, eating cheese a thousand years old made from old goat's milk, and dug from the Pyramids too late to save it, was what surrounded us, and the sand storm blew through the cars laden with germs of the plague, and stuck to us so tight you couldn't get it off with sandpaper, and when we got here all we have had to do is to bathe the dirt off in layers. [Illustration: It takes nine baths to get down to American epidermis 304] It takes nine baths to get down to American epidermis, and the last bath has a jackplane to go with it, and a thing they scale fish with. But we are all right now, with rooms in the hotel, and rested, and when we go home we are going to be salted down and given chloroform and shipped as mummies. Dad insists that he will never cross a desert or an ocean again, and I don't know what is to become of us. Anyway, we are going to enjoy ourselves until we are killed off. The first two days we just looked about Cairo, and saw the congress of nations, for there is nothing just like this town anywhere. There are people from all quarters of the globe, the most outlandish and the most up-to-date. This place is an asylum for fakirs and robbers, a place where defaulters, bribers, murderers, swindlers and elopers are safe, as there seems to be no extradition treaty that cannot be overcome by paying money to the officials. I found that out the first day, and told dad we should have no standing in the society of Egypt unless the people thought he had committed some gigantic crime and fled his country.