ally they retreated to the divans in the cabin, and cursed the cold. I was sure that a blue fleet of icebergs had undertaken the Nile voyage, and were coming up behind us. I knew that we should meet white bear for hippopotami, walruses for crocodiles, and the north pole for the equator. Why not push on and find Sir John Franklin!

So the wind and cold hovered, awful, upon the edges of dreaming. Southward, southward, no hope but the tropic, and we entered the tropic one chilly morning that would not let me think of Mungo Park, but only of Captain Parry.

O cow-horned Isis, and thou, western Athor, forgive, that so far this pen could go, so much treason trace, to the eternal warm repose of your land. Yet only by a force that compelled exaggeration could it be induced. The book is closed now-the daguerreotype of those days. Egypt is given to the past, and memory shows it windless as a picture. There it lies golden-shored in eternal summer. I confess it now-Egypt is that dream-land, that tropical trance. There lingers the fadeless green, of which, shivering in our white wintry palaces, we dream. The howling ghosts are laid; those wild winds have all blown themselves away; that fleet of icebergs has joined the Spanish Armada

The Nile does not lead to the North-west Passage, nor is Mungo Park a myth.

Memory is the magician. She cuts the fangs from the snakes that stung the past, and wreaths them, rainbow garlands, around its paling brows. The evil days are not remembered. Time, as a purging wind, blows them like dead leaves away, as winds window the woods in autumn.

15*

XLV.

PER CONTRA.

FOR the dream-days dawn-lotus-eating days of faith in the poets as the only practical people, because all the world is poetry-of capitulation to Bishop Berkeley, and confession that only we exist, and the rest is sheer seeming-when thought is arduous, and reading wasteful, and the smoke of the chibouque scarcely aerial enough-days that dissolve the world in light. The azure air and azure water mingle. We float in rosy radiance, through which waves the shore-a tremulous opacity.

In the Arabian Night days of life, come, hauntingly, vague desires to make the long India voyage. The pleasant hiatus in actual life—the musing monotony of the day-the freedom of the imagination on a calm sea, under a cloudless sky-the far floatings before trade-winds-the strange shores embowered with tropical luxuriance, and an exhaustless realm of new experience, are the forms and fascination of that longing.

But the Nile more fairly realizes that dreamvoyage. The blank monotony of sea and sky is relieved here by the tranquil, ever-varying, graceful shores, the constant panorama of a life new to the eye, oldest to the mind, and associations unique in history. The palms, the desert, the fair fertility of unfading fields, mosques, minarets, camels, the broad beauty of the tranced river-these unsphere us, were there no Thebes, no Sphinx, no Memnon, Pyramids, or Karnak, no simple traditions of Scripture, and wild Arabian romances-the sweetest stories of our reading.

In the early morning, flocks of water-birds are ranged along the river-herons, kingfishers, flamingoes, ducks, ibis-a motley multitude in the shadow of the high clay banks, or on the low sandy strips. They spread languid wings, and sail snowily away. The sun strikes them into splendor. They float and fade, and are lost in the brilliance of the sky. Under the sharp, high rocks, at the doors of their cliff-retreats, sit sagely the cormorants, and meditate the passing Howadji. Like larger birds reposing, shine the sharp sails of boats near or far. Their images strike deep into the water and tremble away.

Then come the girls and women to the water-side, bearing jars upon their heads. On the summit of the bank they walk erect and stately, profile-drawn

against the sky. Bending, and plashing, and playing in the water, with little jets of laugh that would brightly flash, if we could see them, they fill their jars, and in a long file recede and disappear among the palms. Over the brown mud villages the pigeons coo and fly, and hang by hundreds upon the clumsy towers built for them, and a long pause of sun and silence follows.

Presently turbanned Abraham with flowing garment and snowy beard, leaning upon his staff, passes with Sarah along the green path on the river's edge toward Memphis and King Pharaoh. On the opposite desert lingers Hagar with Ishmael, pausing, pausing, and looking back.

The day deepens, calmer is the calm. It is noon, and magnificent Dendereh stands inland on the desert edge of Libya, a temple of rare preservation, of Isis-headed columns, with the same portrait of Cleopatra upon the walls-a temple of silence, with dark chambers cool from the sun, and the sculptures in cabinet squares upon the wall. Let it float by, no more than a fleeting picture forever It is St. Valentine's Day, but they are harvesting upon the shores, resting awhile now, till the sun is sloping. The shadeless Libyan and Arabian highlands glare upon the burning sun. The slow sakias sing and sigh. The palms are moveless as in the backgroundø