At one time or another I have seen a good many people of renown; but I have never seen anything more magnificent than the Emperor Frederick, when Crown Prince, seated on his horse and wearing the white dress of the Cuirassiers. He was grander even than the statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni. I saw the Mahmal at Cairo on 11 February 1882. There was a vast crowd, and the Mahmal was received with a salute of sixteen guns, and the Khedive with a salute of twenty-one; but neither made so great a show as Arabi. On 2 February he had made himself Minister of War, and there was a notion that he would choose this occasion for making himself Khedive; but nothing happened then. I had passed through Tell el-Kebir on 4 February, and should have looked at it more closely, had I foreseen what would be happening there on 13 September. I sailed from Alexandria on 11 March, and never imagined then that there would be a massacre there on 11 June, and a bombardment on 11 July. On the morning of the procession I saw the Mahmal saddled on its camel: after which the camel went out to meet the Mecca Caravan, and then marched into the city with the pilgrims, as though it had come all the way from Mecca. As a matter of fact, the Mahmal is nothing but a pair of panniers with a canopy above, such as women ride in when they make the pilgrimage, only more ornate. There is nothing whatever inside it. The story is that queen Sheger ad-Durr made the pilgrimage in very splendid panniers about the year 1250; and such panniers have been sent each year since then, though nobody has ever ridden in them. The procession was too straggling to be impressive as a whole, but some things in it were striking--particularly the Sheikh of the Camel. That holy man kept wagging his head from side to side, as if he wished to shake it off; and he was said to go on wagging it all the way from Cairo to Mecca and back. I went to Siena to see the Palio in August 1898. It has not been vulgarized like the Carnivale, as it comes at a season when few people go to Italy.--In my opinion, people generally choose the wrong time of year for going there. To see Italy in all its glory, one must be there at the Vintage. Strictly speaking, the Palio is the banner which forms the prize in a race of ten horses, representing ten of the seventeen wards into which the city is divided; seven of the wards being selected by rotation and three by lot. There are trial races on the 14th and 15th, and the race itself is on the 16th. It is run in honour of God and of the Blessed Virgin Mary, by statute of 17 June 1310; and the horses go to church before the race, and are blessed and sprinkled with holy water after certain prayers on their behalf.