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master, the romance will unroll like a cloud wreath from that poetic tawny friend, and he will find all and more than the faults of a European courier, with none of his capacities.

O, golden-sleeved Commander of the Faithful, what a prelude to your praises. For Mohammed was the best we saw, and so agreed all who knew him. Dogberry was already his Laureate. Mohammed was truly "tolerable and not to be endured.” He was ignorant, vain, and cowardly, but fairly honest, extremely good-humored, and an abominable cook. He was a devout Muslim, and had a pious abhorrence of ham. His deportment was grave and pompous, blending the Turkish and Egyptian elements of his parentage. Like a child he shrunk and shrivelled under the least pain or exposure. But he loved the high places and the sweet morsels; and to be called of men, Effendi, dilated his soul with delight. He was always well dressed in the Egyptian manner, and bent in awful reverence before them old Turks" who, surrounded by a multitudinous hareem, and an army of slaves, were the august peerage of his imagination.

His great glory, however, was a golden-sleeved bournouse of goat's hair, presented to him at Damascus by some friendly Howadji. This he gathered about him on all convenient occasions to

create an impression. At the little towns on the Nile, and among the Arabs of the desert, how imposing was the golden-sleeved Commander! Occasionally he waited at dinner in this robe--and then was never Jove so superbly served. Yet the grandeur, as usual, was inconsonant with agility, and many a wrecked dish of pudding or potatoes paid the penalty of splendor.

So here our commander of the faithful steps into history, goldenly arrayed. Let him not speak for himself. For, although his English was intelligible and quite sufficient, yet he recognized no auxiliary but "be," and no tense but the present. Hence, when he wished to say that the tobacco would be milder when it had absorbed the water, he darkly suggested, "He be better when he be drink his water;" and a huge hulk of iron lying just outside Cairo, was "the steamer's saucepan ;" being the boiler of a Suez steamer. Nor will the Pacha forget that sunny Syrian morning, when the commander led us far and far out of our way for a "short cut." Wandering, lost, and tangled in flaunting flowers, through long valleys and up steep hillsides, we emerged at length upon the path which we ought never to have left, and the good commander lighting his chibouque with the air of a general lighting his cigar after victory, announced impres

sively, "I be found that way by my sense, by my head!" Too vain to ask or to learn, he subjected us to the same inconveniences day after day, for the past disappears from the dragomanic mind as utterly as yesterday's landscape from his eye.

The moon brightened the golden sleeve that first Nile evening, as the commander descended the steep bank, superintending the embarking of the luggage; and while he spreads the cloth and the crew gather about the kitchen to sing, we will hang in our gallery the portrait of his coadjutor, Hadji Hamed, the cook.

III.

HADJI HAMED.

I WAS donkeying one morning through the bazaars of Cairo, looking up at the exquisitely elaborated overhanging lattices, wondering if the fences of Paradise were not so rarely inwrought, dreaming of the fair Persian slave, of the Princess Shemselnihar, the three ladies of Bagdad, and other mere star dust, my eye surfeiting itself the while with forms and costumes that had hitherto existed only in poems and pictures, when I heard suddenly, "Have you laid in any potatoes ?" and beheld beaming elderly John Bull by my side.

"It occurred to me," said he, "that the long days upon the Nile might be a little monotonous, and I thought the dinner would be quite an event."

"Allah!" cried I, as the three ladies of Bagdad faded upon my fancy, "I thought we should live on sunsets on the Nile."

The beaming elderly Bull smiled quietly and glanced at his gentle rotundity, while I saw bottles.

boxes, canisters, baskets, and packages of all sizes laid aside in the shop-little anti-monotonous arrangements for the Nile.

"I hope you have a good cook," said John Bull, as he moved placidly away upon his donkey, and was lost in the dim depths of the bazaar.

Truly we were loved of the Prophet, for our cook was also a Mohammed, an Alexandrian, and doubtless especially favored, not for his name's sake only, but because he had been a pilgrim to Mecca, and hence a Hadji forever after. It is a Mohammedan title, equivalent to our "major" and "colonel" as a term of honor, with this difference, that with us it is not always necessary to have been a captain to be called such; but in Arabia is no man a Hadji who has not performed the Mecca pilgrimage. Whether a pilgrimage to Paris, and devotion to sundry shrines upon the Boulevards, had not been as advantageous to Hadji Hamed as kissing the holy Mecca-stone, was a speculation which we did not indulge; for his cuisine was admirable.

Yet I sometimes fancied the long lankness of the Hadji Hamed's figure, streaming in his far-flowing whiteness of garment up the Boulevards, and claiming kindred with the artistes of the "Café" or of the "Maison dorée." They would needs have sacré bleu'd. Yet might the Hadji have well challenged them to

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