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

finding the scenery sadly monotonous. But birds cannot sing until the pie is opened, O Doctor, nor can eyes see, until all films are removed. Yet stretching your head a little upward, as we sit upon this grass clump on the high bank of the river, you shall see something that will make Egypt always memorable to you. For, as we sat there one morning, we saw a dark, undulating mass upon the edge of the fog bank that was slowly rolling northward away. I thought it a flight of pigeons, but the Pacha said that it did not move like pigeons.

The mass, now evidently a flight of birds, came sweeping southward toward us, high in the blue air, and veering from side to side like a ship in tacking. With every sunward sweep, their snow-white bodies shone like a shower of most silver stars, or rather, to compare large things with small, if Bacchus will forgive, they floated suspended in the blue air like flakes of silver, as the gold flakes hang in a vessel of eau de Duntzic.

There was a graceful, careless order in their flying, and as they turned from side to side, the long lines undulated in musical motion. I have never seen movement so delicious to the eye as their turning sweep. The long line throbbed and palpitated as if an electric sympathy were emitted from the pure points of their wings. There was nothing

tumbling or gay in their feeling of languid life. ments were voluptuous. not in vain along their snowiness, nor were they, without meaning, flying to the south. There was no sound but the whirring of innumerable wings, as they passed high over our heads, a living cloud between us and the sun. Now it was a streaming whiteness in the blue, now it was as mellowly dark, as they turned to or from the sun, and so advanced, the long lines giving and trembling sometimes, like a flapping sail in a falling breeze, then bellying roundly out again, as if the wind had risen. When they were directly above us, one only note was dropped from some thoughtful flamingo, to call attention to the presence of strangers below. But beyond musket-shot, even if not beyond fear, as they undoubtedly were, the fair company swept on unheeding a beautiful boon for the south, and laden with what strange tidings from northern woods! The bodies were rosy white and the wings black, and the character of their flight imparted an air of delicacy and grace to all association with the birds, so that it is natural and pleasant to find that Roman Apicius, the Epicurean, is recorded to have discovered the exquisite relish of the flamingo's tongue, and a peculiar mode of dressing it. The

impression, but an intense Their curves and moveThe southern sun flashed

Howadji had not been unwilling at dinner to have tasted the delicate tongue that shed the one note of warning. But long before dinner the whir of beautiful wings, and the rose-cloud of flamingoes had died away deep into the south.

The poor, unwinged Ibis claimed no kindred as the birds flew by, but clung quietly to the shore. The sun, too, in setting—well, is it not strange that in the radiant purple of sunset and dawn-the fellahs, denizens of these melancholy mud cabins, behold the promise of the plague? What sympathy have we with those who see a plague-spot in the stately splendor of these sunsets?

Day by day, as we descended, we were enjoying the feast which we had but rehearsed in ascending. Edfoo, Kum Ombos, El Kab-names of note and marks of memory. Men dwell in tombs still, and came out to offer us all kinds of trinkets and gay wares. Then, upon dog-like donkeys we rode with feet dangling on the ground, across the green plain of the valley to the Arabian desert, whose line is as distinctly and straightly marked along the green, as the sea line along the shore. The cultivated plain does not gradually die away through deeper and more sandy barrenness into the desert, but it strikes it with a shock, and ends suddenly; and the widewaving corn and yellow cotton grow on the edge