_Monday, 2nd._--Resumed work; painted for a couple of hours--badly--in a high wind at an ugly study of a view I don't like. I consider it a sort of discipline. The wind to-day is tremendously high; the dahabiehs will come flying up now. I saw my friend the captain just now sitting on the bank in the midst of an interested circle having his fortune told. There is a blessing for them that wait. Hosseyn has caught a fish! two fishes, to-day! his glee is unlimited, he is radiant; when that boy is at the near end of his fishing rope, he is so absorbed I can't get him to attend to me or to answer a question. His brilliant piscatorial success is an opportune set-off against a chagrin the poor boy had this morning; he was taking a dip somewhere under the paddle-box, and lost, in putting away his clothes (_he_ thinks by a black but improbable theft), a Koran with which he travels and to which he attributes much luck; he was greatly cut up, and after telling me how much he valued the book, proceeded to inform me that it contained a little piece of wood from Abyssinia with something written on it, "some, what you call, scription," which, when worn round the neck, infallibly cured the bite of the scorpion; seeing that this announcement did not impress me as much as he had expected, he asked me with some warmth how I supposed, pray, that the snake-charmers prevented the snakes from biting them if it was not by saying something out of the Bible. Another sheep to-day; there was some hitch about the manner of the killing which caused a little excitement; his throat was not turned to the sun (or the East?) whilst he was being slaughtered; an important matter. I observe that Turkish officials are not expected to be able to write; my captain can, but I remarked that when his secretary, a poor, wizened little thing, whose nose and trousers are far too short, but whose mouth and ears offer ample compensation through their length, brought him to-day the ship's accounts, he stamped his signature at the foot of the page instead of writing it, although he happened to have a pen in his hand; I was giving him his English lesson. Talking of accounts, the Arabs have a curious way of singing or rather intoning their sums, rocking all the while backwards and forwards like so many Dervishes. I have seen a large house of business (at Sohag) where _all_ the clerks were doing it at once; it was like a madhouse. Oh, Lombard Street, and oh, Mark Lane! what would you have felt at the sight?