rapid, and the Howadji had safely passed the most appalling slope of the cataract.

Chaos came again immediately. The pilot descended from his post, and expressed his opinion that such accurate and able pilotage deserved an extraordinary bucksheesh, implying, with ethics not alone oriental, that having done his duty, he was entitled to more than praise. The men of Mahratta smiled significantly at the Howadji, as if such remarkable exertions as theirs were possibly hardly to be measured by merely infidel minds; and there was a general air of self-satisfaction pervading all faces, as if the savage faculty, and not the grace of God, had brought us through the cataract.

We tarried a little while upon the shore, and then glided again down the swift stream. It was only swift now, not startling, and the rockiness was farther withdrawn, and there were smooth reaches of water. We saw several Howadji loitering upon a sandy slope. The sun seemed not to sparkle, as before the descent, in the excitement of the morning, and there was the same old sunny tranquillity of Egypt breathing over the dying rages, and up through the rocky ways of the cataract. It was the lull and repose that follow intense excitement, and of so suggestive a character, that the Howadji recalled with sympathy the aerial aquarelle of Turner

-the summit of the Gotthard pass, looking toward Italy. It is a wonderful success of art; for in the warmth, and depth, and variety of the hue, which has the infinite rarity and delicacy of Italian air, and which seems rather a glow and rosy suffusion than a material medium-in that, and through that, the bloom of Italy breathes warm beauty far into Switzerland, and steeps the spectator in the South. The eye clings to it, and bathes in it as the soul and memory in Italian days. So in the tender tranquillity of that morning succeeding the rapids, all the golden greenness and sweet silence of Egypt below Syene, breathed beauty and balm over what was the Ibis. How few things are singly beautiful! Is there any single beauty? For all beauty seems to adorn itself with all other beauty, and while the lover's mistress is only herself, she has all the beauty of all beautiful women.

Thus with songs singing in their minds, came the Howadji swiftly to Syene. The current bore us graciously along, like the genii that serve gracefully when once their pride and rage is conquered. The struggle and crisis of the morning only bound us more nearly to the river. O blue-spectacled Gunning! the dream-languor of our river is not passionless sloth, but the profundity of passion. And I pray Athor, the queen of the West, and the lady

of lovers, that so may be charactered the many winding courses of your life.

But Verde Giovane and Gunning had flown northward toward Thebes, leaving only miraculous memories of a dejeuner at Philæ, upon men's minds in Syene, and strange relics of bones and fruit-skins upon the temple ruins. Beaming elderly John

Far

Bull was also flown, and with him Mrs. Bull, doubtlessly still insisting that the kaftan was a nightgown. And Wines and the Irish Doctor who plunged into the Nile mystery at Alexandria, were also gone. They were all off toward Thebes. But Nero was still deep in Nubia, solemnly cursing contrary winds, while Nera, quietly reposing in the sumptuous little cabin, shed the lovely light of a new thought of woman like a delicate dawn upon the dusky mental night of the "Kid's" crew. under Aboo Simbel, too, fluttered the blue pennant, still streaming backward to the south, whither it had pointed. The English consul's dahabieh—a floating palace of delights-was at Syene, and the leisure barque of an artist, whose pencil, long dipped in the sunshine of the East, will one day magically evoke for us the great dream of the Nile. But we lingered long enough only to buy some bread, and as the full moon goldened the palm fringe of the river, the little feline reis, happy to be in

command once more, thrummed the long silent tarabuka, and with clapping hands and long, lingering, sonorous singing, the boat drifted slowly down the

river.

XXXIV.

FLAMINGOES.

WHILE the Ibis flies no longer, but floats, a junk, and for the Howadji has forever furled her wings, they step ashore as the boat glides idly along, and run up among the mud cabins and the palm-groves. They were always the same thing, like the layfigure of an artist, which he drapes and disguises, and makes exhaustlessly beautiful with color and form. So the day, with varying lights and differing settings of the same relief, made endless picture of the old material. You are astonished that you do not find the Nile monotonous. Palms, shores, and hills, hills, shores, and palms, and ever the old picturesqueness of costume, yet fresh and beautiful every day, as the moon every month, and the stars each evening. This is not to be explained by novelty, but by the essential beauty of the objects. Those objects are shapeless mud huts for instance, O Reverend Dr. Duck, voyaging upon the Nile with Mrs. Duck for the balm of the African breath, and