Port Said is a rambling town, whose half brick, half timber buildings have a general air of dilapidation and unfinish which is depressing. The somewhat picturesque principal bazaar street is soon exhausted, and excepting for the imposing offices of the Suez Canal Company, and the fine statue to De Lesseps, recently erected on the breakwater, Port Said has little else to excite the curiosity of the visitors; built upon a mud-bank formed of Suez Canal dredgings, its existence is its most interesting feature, and the white breakers of the Mediterranean, above which it is so little raised, seem ever ready to engulf it as they toss and tumble upon its narrow beach. Leaving Port Said behind, the train travels slowly along the canal bank, and we begin to enter Egypt. On the right the quiet waters of Lake Menzala, fringed with tall reeds and eucalyptus trees, stretches to the far horizon, where quaintly shaped fishing-boats disappear with their cargoes towards distant Damietta. Thousands of wild birds, duck of all kinds, ibis and pelican, fish in the shallows, or with the sea-gulls wheel in dense masses in the air, for this is a reservation as a breeding-green for wild-fowl, where they are seldom, if ever, disturbed. On the left is the Suez Canal, the world's highway to the Far East, and ships of all nations pass within a stone's throw of your train. Between, and in strange contrast with the blueness of the canal, runs a little watercourse, reed fringed, and turbid in its rapid flow. This is the "sweet-water" canal, and gives its name to one of our engagements with Arabi's army, and which, from the far-distant Nile, brings fresh water to supply Port Said and the many stations on its route. To the south and east stretches the mournful desert in which the Israelites began their forty years of wandering, and which thousands of Moslems annually traverse on their weary pilgrimage to Mecca; while in all directions is mirage, so perfect in its deception as to mislead the most experienced of travellers at times. Roaming over the desert which hems in the delta, solitary shepherds, strangely clad and wild-looking, herd their flocks of sheep and goats which browse upon the scrub. These are the descendants of those same Ishmaelites who sold Joseph into Egypt, and the occasional encampment of some Bedouin tribe shows us something of the life which the patriarchs might have led. In contrast with the desert, the delta appears very green and fertile, for we are quickly in the land of Goshen, most beautiful, perhaps, of all the delta provinces.