You are not so fortunate as you seem. You have a great deal of sense, but more sense than knowledge. You can give admirable advice to other people. Your judgment is excellent as regards others, but bad as regards yourself. You never take your own good advice. You are fond of your friends. You prefer talk to action. You suffer from indecision. You are fond of the stage. You are susceptible to female beauty. You are witty, amiable, and well educated, but you have a weakness for coarse jokes. You are superstitious and believe in ghosts. You can make people laugh; you often pretend to be more foolish than you are. At other times you will surprise people by your power of apt repartee. Your bane will be an inclination to fat which will hamper you in fighting. You are unsuccessful as a soldier, but unrivalled as a companion and philosopher. You will mix in high society, and have friends at Court. You will come off badly in personal encounter, and your final enemy will be a king.” Now, imagine him saying exactly the same thing to Falstaff. Doesn’t it fit him just as well? Can’t you imagine Falstaff saying, “He has hit me off to a T,” and Hamlet murmuring, “My prophetic soul”? In fact, I believe the profession of a fortune-teller, after that of a hair-specialist, to be the finest profession in the world, and the easiest. In the first place it is almost impossible to prevent the patient from telling you the whole of his past and present of his own accord; and even if he doesn’t do this, a little deft cross-examination involved in a mass of vague generalization will extract a good deal. This particular Nubian in the course of the process asked me my age, my profession, whether I was married, what my financial prospects were, and whether I had any children. However, I refused to answer questions; but I very nearly did once or twice, so insinuatingly were the questions put. I further tested the process by having my fortune and character told by a second seer, and he said exactly the same things as the first had said, and I afterwards found out that he also had said exactly the same thing to some one else. _The Red Sea: in July_ The first day you say it is pleasant. The second day you say the stories about the heat you have heard are gross exaggerations. The third day you feel the heat; and the fourth you realize that you are morning, noon, and night in a Turkish bath that hasn’t got a cooling-room. And yet the energetic played cricket and quoits. One morning (quite early in the morning) a tragedy happened. One of the stokers, a Maltee, went mad, owing to the heat, and jumped overboard. The steamer stopped, but nothing could be done. The sea is full of sharks. The air is full of little particles of dust which makes your hair gritty. The best way to spend one’s time is, I think, to remain obstinately motionless in a chair, dressed in the lightest of clothes, and to read novels, stories which engage without unduly straining the attention.