It is always difficult to realise the state of mind of another person, even of one who is perhaps an equal in education, and who has been reared amid the same ideas and surroundings as one’s own; but it is impossible to really take the same standpoint as one of another race, another education, and another standard of duty and of morals. We cannot, therefore, see the world as a fellah sees it; and I believe this the more readily because after living the most part of ten years among the fellahin, and being accused of having gone some way toward them, I yet feel the gulf between their nature and my own as impassable as ever. One measuring-line may perhaps give some slight idea of their position. The resemblances between Egypt of the present and mediaeval England are enough to help our feelings in the matter. There is the same prevalence of the power of the great man of the village; the same rough-and-ready justice administered by him; the same lack of intercommunication, the same suspicion of strangers; the absence of roads, and use of pack animals, is alike; the lack of shops in all but large towns, and the great importance of the weekly markets in each village, is similar again; and the mental state of the people seems to be somewhat akin to that of our ancestors. [Illustration: 113. HOUSES IN THE DELTA, WITH RAIN-PROOF DOMES.] The man who can read and write is the rare exception in the country; perhaps two per cent. of the fellahin men can do so, but probably not one woman in ten thousand. Of education there is but very little, for the great majority of the people; in villages the children of the fellah seldom go to school, and in large towns the scholars are but a minority of the boys, while the girls are nowhere. In accounts they have some sharpness, but their reckoning would amuse an infant scholar in England. I overheard some quick lads, of about sixteen, anxiously discussing what a man’s wages were at £3 a month: they pretty soon saw that it was £1, or 100 piastres, every ten days, but how many piastres a day that was puzzled them all. One fellow proposed eleven; he was contradicted by another who said twelve; then another tried 9½; and at last, as a great discovery, one sagely reminded them all that ten tens made a hundred, and so a hundred piastres in ten days _must_ be ten piastres a day. Egypt would almost satisfy Jack Cade.