in our poetic Orient beauty is more beautiful, but deformity more deformed. The excellent Effendi or paternal Pacha has twenty or two hundred wives, and is, of necessity, unfaithful. But if the ballooned Georgian or Circassian slips up, it is into the remorseless river.

Yet with what solemn shadows do these musings endow the Egyptian moonlight. They move invisible over the face of the waters, and evoke another creation. Columbus sailed out of the Mediterranean to a new world. We have sailed into it, to a new one. The South seduces now, as the West of old. When we reach one end of the world, the other has receded into romantic dimness, and beckons us backward to explore. The Howadji seek Cathay In the morning, with wide-winged sails, we shall fly beyond our history. Listen! How like a pedler-poet of Cairo chanting his wares, moans Time through the Eternity-" Cobwebs and fable, O history!"

II.

THE DRAG'-0-MEN.

As we stepped on board, we should have said, " In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful." For so say all pious Muslim, undertaking an arduous task; and so let all pious Howadji exclaim when they set forth with any of those "guides, philosophers, and friends," the couriers of the Orient—the Dragomen.

These gentry figure well in the Eastern books. The young traveller, already enamored of Eothen's Dhemetri, or Warburton's Mahmoud, or Harriet Martineau's Alee, leaps ashore, expecting to find a very Pythias to his Damon mood, and in his constant companion to embrace a concrete Orient. These are his Alexandrian emotions and hopes. Those poets, Harriet and Eliot, are guilty of much. Possibly as the youth descends the Lebanon to Beyrout, five months later, he will still confess that it was the concrete Orient; but own that he knew not the East, in those merely Mediterranean moods of hope and romantic reading.

The Howadji lands at Alexandria, and is immediately invested by long lines of men in bright turbans and baggy breeches. If you have a slight poetic tendency, it is usually too much for you You succumb to the rainbow sash and red slippers. "Which is Alee ?" cry you, in enthusiasm; and lo! all are Alee. No, but with Dhemetri might there not be rich Eastern material and a brighter Eothen? Yes, but all are Dhemetri. "Mahmoud, Mahmoud!" and the world of baggy breeches responds, "Yes, sir."

If you are heroic, you dismiss the confusing crowd, and then the individuals steal separately and secretly to your room and claim an audience. They have volumes of their own praise. Travelling Cockaigne has striven to express its satisfaction in the most graceful and epigrammatic manner. The "characters" in all the books have a sonnet-like air, each filling its page, and going to the same tune. There is no scepticism, and no dragoman has a fault. Records of such intelligence, such heroism, such perseverance, honesty and good cooking, exist in no other literature. It is Eothen and the other poets in a more portable form.

Some Howadji can not resist the sonnets and the slippers, and take the fatal plunge even at Alexandria. Wines and the ecstatic Irish doctor did so

under our eyes, and returned six weeks later to Cairo, from the upper Nile, with just vigor enough remaining to get rid of their man. For the Turkish costume and the fine testimonials are only the illuminated initials of the chapter. Very darkly monotonous is the reading that follows.

the Eastern costume.

The Dragoman is of four species: the Maltese, or the able knave,-the Greek, or the cunning knave, -the Syrian, or the active knave,-and the Egyptian, or the stupid knave. They wear, generally, But the Maltese and the Greeks often sport bad hats and coats, and call themselves Christians. They are the most ignorant, vain, incapable, and unsatisfactory class of men that the wandering Howadji meets. They travel constantly the same route, yet have no eyes to see nor ears to hear. If on the Nile, they smoke and sleep in the boat. If on the desert, they smoke and sleep on the camel. If in Syria, they smoke and sleep, if they can, on the horse. It is their own comfort—their own convenience and profit, which they constantly pursue. The Howadji is a bag of treasure thrown by a kind fate upon their shores, and they are the wreckers who squeeze, tear, and pull him, top, bottom, and sideways, to bleed him of his burden.

They should be able to give you every information

about your boat, and what is necessary, and what useless. Much talk you do indeed get, and assurance that every thing will be accurately arranged; but you are fairly afloat upon the Nile before you discover how lost upon the dragoman have been all his previous voyages.

With miserable weakness they seek to smooth the moment, and perpetually baffle your plans, by telling you not the truth, but what they suppose you wish the truth to be. Nothing is ever more than an hour or two distant. They involve you in absurd arrangements because " it is the custom ;" and he is a hardy Howadji who struggles against the vis inertiæ of ignorant incapacity and miserable cheating through the whole tour.

Active intelligence on the Howadji's part is very disgusting to them. If he scrutinize his expenses,— if he pretend to know his own will or way-much more to have it executed, the end of things clearly approaches to the dragomanic mind. The small knaveries of cheating in the price of every thing purchased, and in the amount of bucksheesh or gratuity on all occasions, are not to be seriously heeded, because they are universal. The real evils are the taking you out of your way for their own comfort, -the favoring a poor resting place or hotel, because they are well paid there, and the universally