It is usual for the people of the town to lay in their annual stock of grain when cheapest, which is commonly about the month of December. At that time two, sometimes three _mids_ (pecks) of millet (_Dokn_) may be had for a string of beads, worth about one penny sterling in Kahira.] [Footnote 44: Fruit of India.] [Footnote 45: Season of the rains.] [Footnote 46: I remember to have borrowed, while at Damascus, a small quarto volume, written in easy Arabic, without either title or conclusion, which contained a kind of history of the progress of the (_ashab_) early propagators of Mohammedism, and which enumerated, if I mistake not, a tribe under the denomination of Fûr فور among their adversaries, after the taking of _Bahnesé_ in Middle Egypt, and their consequent invasion of the more Southern provinces.] [Footnote 47: If but a small quantity of rain fall, the agricultors are reduced to great distress; and it happened, about seven years before my arrival, that many people were obliged to eat the young branches of trees pounded in a mortar.] [Footnote 48: The inhabitants of a village called _Bernoo_, having quarrelled with those of another hamlet, and some having been killed on both sides, all the property of both villages was forfeited to the king, the inhabitants being abandoned to poverty.] [Footnote 49: About a century and a half ago.] [Footnote 50: A great tribute is also paid in butter.] [Footnote 51: _Thummara Hindi_ means simply _Fruit of India_, not _date_, as insinuated by the learned author of the _Botanical Observations_, in _Asiatic Researches_, vol. iv. p. 250.] [Footnote 52: This is observable in many of the slaves. They seem to esteem it a beauty. In filing the teeth, they also force the gums from them, to make them appear longer: the teeth in this case suffer discoloration, but do not appear to undergo a consequent decay.] [Footnote 53: Qui Africæ aut Asiæ plagis peragratis, primi hunc exsecandi morem Occidentalibus narravere auctores, ab ore incolarum re acceptâ, et novitate ejus perculsi, de modo excisionis toto cælo errare solent, nymphas exsecari perhibentes: prorsus ineptè quidem, sed septâ pudicitiâ vitam agentibus, nunquam illis nudam vel è longinquo vidisse, multo minùs muliebria attrectavisse, uti manifestum, contigerat.] [Footnote 54: Quoties autem confibulatio fortior meatûs etiam urinarii aditum claudere minetur, plumâ vel osseâ quâdam tubulâ adhibitâ, illam in ore urethræ inserunt, ibidemque tenent, usque dum canalis majoris aditui amplius invigilare non sit opus.] [Footnote 55: In the neighbourhood of Damiatt the Papyrus is termed _el-Berdî_. Another name is also given it, evidently derived from the term in use among us, _El-Babîr_.] [Footnote 56: The butcher.]