The Land of Goshen is to-day one of the finest parts of the Nile Valley. My whole way from Cairo to Zagazig was through rich crops of cotton, sugar cane, and clover. There was green everywhere, and I could ride from here twenty miles more to the eastward before reaching the desert. The railroad from Cairo to the Suez Canal goes directly through Goshen. It strikes the canal at Ismailia and then branches off north and south, following the canal to Suez on the Red Sea, and to Port Said on the Mediterranean. The first section is over the road which led from Arabia to Memphis and Heliopolis, cities long since replaced by Cairo, the metropolis of Egypt. Zagazig, where I am stopping, is one of the chief cities in the Delta. It is on the freshwater canal and the big irrigation ditch which leads to the Nile. It is famous as a cotton port, and to-day camels are coming into the town with bales on their backs, and long trainloads are starting out for Alexandria and Port Said, whence the cotton will be shipped off to Europe and America. The cotton scenes are features of the landscape unknown in the days of Joseph and Jacob. At that time the only clothes made in Egypt were of flax or wool. Nobody knew of the cotton plant, and it was not until the Middle Ages that Europe learned anything about it. The first knowledge of it was brought by the traveller, Sir John Mandeville, who said that the East Indians had a shrub or bush, half vegetable and half animal. It was called the vegetable lamb of Tartary. According to Sir John, it was a plant which blossomed out at the top in a living sheep that bent down and ate the grass growing luxuriantly about it. The sheep had a thick coat of wool, and from this came the cotton of India. Sir John wrote that this plant beast had flesh, bones, and blood, and that he had not only seen but eaten it. He closed with the statement that all thought it wonderful but that “God is marveyllous in his werkes.” This was about 1350 A.D., and many years before the real nature of cotton became known in Egypt and cotton seeds were planted. Now the crop is grown everywhere in Goshen, and thrives on almost every spot where the feet of the Israelites trod. It covers the Delta and large plantations have been set out even in old Nubia and the Sudan. Cotton has supplanted grain as a money-making crop and is worth far more than the grain that Joseph had cornered when the years of famine began. This Land of Goshen is a fine stock country. Camels, buffaloes, and donkeys are staked out in the fields, and flocks of sheep and goats feed there, watched by shepherds. There are also droves of camels grazing or lying on the ground, chewing their cuds. All have their herdsmen. There are no fences in Egypt; the fields are bounded by imaginary lines. Sometimes the limits are marked by water ditches, or little embankments made for irrigation.