First, leaping in a frantic dance such as one sees here at weddings and religious festivals, came some score of sayces, their lawn sleeves flaunting as they waved their arms, and their gold-broidered waistcoats gleaming bravely in the moonlight. Their usual cry of ‘_Shmarlek, Gemeelek_,’ was interrupted now by hoarse shouts of ‘Inglis, Inglis, long live the Inglis!’—shouts which the crowd readily took up. Immediately behind them paced a tall, half-naked negro, who—such is the length to which enthusiasm will carry these fanatics—held outstretched before him (a sacrifice to friendship), his brawny right arm transfixed by a long knife, from whose blade his blood dripped freely to the ground. A carriage followed—an ordinary hack victoria, captured, doubtless, close by—round which a frenzied mob surged, yelling and gesticulating madly. There was no driver on the carriage. The box-seat was occupied by a mandolin player and a harpist, whose fingers were very busy, though of their music not one note could be heard. In the victoria were the objects of the demonstration, two English soldiers, one of whom, while preserving his good temper, was struggling manfully though vainly against a dozen pair of hands that held him in his place, and loudly declaring in words as unavailing as they were forcible that he was due in barracks at midnight and could not ‘stay fooling’ any later. His protest was disregarded, and his comrade, who had apparently succumbed to the hospitality of a burly Greek who faced the pair, on the Strapontin, nursing a huge demijohn of some pernicious liquor, gave him no help, expressing neither approval nor condemnation of the proceedings, and, indeed, but for the tender ministrations of an old äalem in a saffron robe, who stood on the step beside him, he would probably have fallen out into the road. The motley carnival passed slowly into the night; the shouts softened in the distance and then died away; but the crowd, silent again, remained staring vacantly at the hotel windows. As I turned from the balcony railings a quiet native spectator on the pavement beneath me looked up and spoke in Arabic: ‘Ah, Hawaga,’ he said, ‘Toufik Pasha has gone; Allah rest him! Now the English are going—evil days are coming.’