Many officers were in the saloon making their way to join the various regiments, and to these Eveline--so young a widow--was an object of no small interest. She seemed to have ripened into the bloom of early womanhood, though all her girlish manner remained with its softness and grace. Her figure had become more rounded and developed; her step was firm, though elastic as ever; and she carried her head with an air of stateliness that was somewhat belied by the occasional sadness of her expression and lassitude of demeanour. To her and to Olive, ever-recurring was the thought, when fairly off the coast of Egypt, how strange it was from the steamer's poop to look upon those places of which they had read so much of late in the newspapers--Alexandria, Suez, Port Said, and so forth--all 'household words' at home now. At the first-named place they saw ample traces of the terrible bombardment, with the details of which they were more familiar than with those of its marble palaces and porphyry temples of the times of old; or of the golden coffin of its young hero, who emulated being a god; of its streets, two thousand feet in width; and its Pharos, whose mirrors of polished steel reflected from afar the galleys of Cleopatra. Suez, with its mosques and caravansaries, its houses of sun-bricks, amid, or rather bordering on, a desert of rock, slightly covered with sand, and where trees, gardens, and meadows are almost entirely unknown, was soon left behind as the train bore them on by Shalouffe, Geneffe, Faid, Serapium, and Nefishe, to Ismailia, so named after Ismail Pasha, and which deems itself the most aristocratic or respectable place upon the canal, as the Khedive erected a palace for himself at the east end of it, and the houses have all a substantial appearance, with neat and trim gardens; and the appearance of its harbour reminded Lord Aberfeldie of that of Balaclava in the time of the Crimean war; and still the Lake of Timsah was crowded with vessels of all sorts and sizes. Despite the deep and keen interest of the matter nearest their hearts--the object which had brought them so far from home--it was impossible for Olive and Eveline not to be occasionally drawn from their own thoughts, and impressed by the novelty of the new sights, scenes, and certain memories of the land they looked on, for the crossing of the Red Sea by the children of Israel took place somewhere near where Ismailia stands, and certain it is that, at no great distance therefrom, it was at El-Khantara-el-Khazneh, the Virgin Mother and the Holy Child passed when Joseph arose by night 'and departed into Egypt.' The wide lake looked now like a land-locked harbour crowded with shipping. Great steamers, magnificent 'troopers,' all painted white, colossal men-of-war lay like leviathans there, while gunboats, launches, and steam-tugs were for ever shooting to and fro.