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nal type of the columns which it will afterward admire in the temples. Almost the first palm is architecturally suggestive, even in those western gardens—but to artists living among them and seeing only them! Men's hands are not delicate in the early ages, and the fountain fairness of the palms is not very flowingly fashioned in the capitals; but in the flowery perfection of the Parthenon the palm triumphs. The forms of those columns came from Egypt, and that which was the suspicion of the earlier workers, was the success of more delicate designing. So is the palm inwound with our art, and poetry, and religion, and of all trees would the Howadji be a palm, wide-waving peace and plenty, and feeling his kin to the Parthenon and Raphael's pictures.

But nature is absolute taste, and has no pure ornament, so that the palm is no less useful than beautiful. The family is infinite and ill understood. The cocoa-nut, date, and sago, are all palms. Ropes and sponges are wrought of their tough interior fibre. The various fruits are nutritious; the wood, the roots, and the leaves, are all consumed. It is one of nature's great gifts to her spoiled sun-darlings. Whoso is born of the sun is made free of the world. Like the poet Thomson, he may put his hands in his pockets and eat apples at leisure.

I do not find that the Egyptians ever deified the palm, as some of them did the crocodile. And therein I find a want of that singular shrewdness of perception which the poet Martineau perpetually praises in that antique people. It was a miserably cowardly thing to make a god of a dragon, who dined and supped upon you and your friends whenever he could catch you; who did nothing but stretch his scales upon the sand in the sun, and left only suspicious musk-balls as a legacy to his worshippers. To deify that mole-eyed monster, and then carefully embalm the dead abomination, looked very like fear, spite of Thothmes, Psamitticus, and Ramses the Great. For, meanwhile, the land entertained angels unawares. They were waving gracious wings over the green fields, and from the womb of plenty dropped the sweet, nutritious dates, and from the plumage of those wings were houses thatched. And every part of the beautiful body, living or dead, was a treasure to the moleeyed crocodile-worshippers. The land was covered with little gods, whispering peace and plenty; but they were no more deified than the sweet stray thoughts of the villagers. Indeed, poet Harriet, your erudite Egyptians went out of their way to worship devils.

They do better, even to this day, higher up the

river. Along the remote shores of the white Nile, are races wild and gentle, who extract the four lower front teeth for beauty, and worship the great trees. And truly, in the tropics, the great tree is a great god. Far outspreading shielding arms, he folds his worshippers from the burning sun, and wrestles wondrously with the wildest gales. Birds build in the sweet security of his shade. Fruit ripens and falls, untended, from his beneficent boughs. At midnight the winds converse with him, and he hides the stars. He outlives genera

tions, and is a cherished tradition.

There is a godlike god! A great tree could proselyte even among Christians. The Boston elm has moved hearts that Park street and Brattle street have never intenerated. There is a serious, sensible worship! The God hath duration, doth nothing harm, and imparts very tangible blessings. The Egyptian worship of the crocodile is very thin, measured by this Dinka religion of the tree. And is the crocodile's a loftier degree of life than the tree's?

It is the date-palm which is so common and graceful in Egypt. Near Asyoot, the ascending Howadji sees for the first time the Dôm palm. This is a heavier, huskier tree, always forked. It has a very tropical air, and solves the mystery of

gingerbread nuts. For if the hard, brown fruit of the Dôm be not the hard, brown nuts which our credulous youth ascribed to the genius of the baker at the corner, they are certainly the type of those gingered blisses; and never did the Howadji seem to himself more hopelessly lost in the magic of Egypt and the East, than when he plucked gingerbread from a palm-tree.

The Dom is coarse by the side of the feathery date-palm, like a clumsy brake among maiden hair ferns. It is tropically handsome, but is always the plebeian palm. It has clumsy hands and feet, and, like a frowsy cook, gawks in the land. But, plumed as a prince and graceful as a gentleman, stands the date; and whoever travels among palms, travels in good society. Southward stretches the Ibis, and morning and evening sees few other trees. They sculpture themselves upon memory, more fairly than upon these old columns. The wave of their boughs henceforward, wherever you are, will be the wave of the magician's wand, and you will float again upon the Nile, and wonder how were shaped the palms upon the shore, when Adam sailed with Eve down the rivers of Eden.

XXIII.

ALMS! O SHOPKEEPER!

THERE are but two sounds in Egypt: the sigh of the sakia, and the national cry of "bucksheesh, Howadji"-Alms, O shopkeeper! Add the ceaseless bark of curs, if you are trinitarian, and you will find your mystic number everywhere made good.

"Bucksheesh Howadji," is the universal greeting. From all the fields, as you stroll along the shore, or sail up the river, swells this vast shout. Young and old, and both sexes, in every variety of shriek, whine, entreaty, demand, contempt, and indifference, weary the Howadji's soul with the incessant cry. Little children who cannot yet talk, struggle to articulate it. Father and mother shout it in full chorus. The boys on the tongues of sakias, the ebony statues at the shadoofs, the spectres in the yellow-blossomed cotton-field, or standing among the grain, break their long silence with this cry only: "Alms, O shopkeeper."

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