Two principles of the fellah nature which Europeans cannot realise at first are that they cannot exercise forbearance, as we have noticed; and secondly, that they cannot stand long-continued temptation. Residents sometimes say that the native is incurably bad; that he may serve you for years, and rob you at the end. But such cases are really the fault of the employer, who has no more right to tempt people to rob him than to tempt them to murder him. To reconcile such a view of the fellah with the astonishing honesty and particularity that I have often found, may seem difficult. But time is the source of the difference. A man who will at once correct his accounts against himself, or bring you some trifle that you have overlooked or forgotten, will be quite incapable of even far less honesty, if the temptation is before him for months. Their impulses are generally sound and honest; but if they begin to look on anything as being in their hands, they drift easily into regarding it as their own. It is only a more rapid application of what may be seen in England regarding long trusts, charities, tenant-right, &c. The straightforward honesty that I have found on most occasions when an immediate temptation was before the fellah, has surprised me, and makes it needful to remember that this must not be strained and tried by continual temptation, the exposure to which will almost certainly spoil the character, and oblige one to cast aside a man who might otherwise have been useful and honest. Knowing this, I regard these failings of the fellah as lying quite as much at his employer’s door as at his own. One of the pleasantest points of the Egyptian character is the genuine and unfeigned hospitality so often met with. If in walking through a village I happen to pass the shekh sitting at his door, he will usually press the stranger to come in and have coffee, and hardly take a refusal. When pitching tent for the night, it is well to avoid coming under the shekh’s notice, or probably he will insist on your stopping in his house: and in the larger towns the shekhs have sometimes excellent guest-chambers, with European furniture. This is hospitality for which no return is expected, or would be accepted. Even with poor people it is the custom for them to press one to stay, and to have coffee or food with them. An Egyptian travelling in England would think it very brutal that neither the squire nor any of the inhabitants of a village should press him to stay for a meal or for the night with them: he would set us down as shamelessly mercenary, and without any sense of propriety or generosity.