have slid upon their music and the moonlight, far forward into the desert. But these are the forms and feelings that their singing suggested. While they sang I wandered over Sahara, and was lost in the lonely Libyan hills,—a thousand simple stories, thousand ballads of love and woe, trooped like drooping birds through the sky-like vagueness of my mind. Rosamond Grey, and the child of Elle passed phantom-like with veiled faces,-for love, and sorrow, and delight, are cosmopolitan, building bowers indiscriminately of palm-treees or of pines.

The voices died away like the muezzins', whose cry is the sweetest and most striking of all eastern sounds. It trembles in long rising and falling cadences from the balcony of the minaret, more humanly alluring than bells, and more respectful of the warm stillness of Syrian and Egyptian days. Heard in Jerusalem it has especial power. You sit upon your housetop reading the history whose profoundest significance is simple and natural in that inspiring clime-and as your eye wanders from the aerial dome of Omar, beautiful enough to have been a dome of Solomon's temple, and over the olives of Gethsemane climbs the mount of Olives-the balmy air is suddenly filled with a murmurous cry like a cheek suddenly rose-suffused-a sound near, and far, and everywhere, but soft, and vibrating, and alluring,

until you would fain don turban, kaftan, and slippers, and kneeling in the shadow of a cypress on the sun-flooded marble court of Omar, would be the mediator of those faiths, nor feel yourself a recreant Christian.

Once I heard the muezzin cry from a little village on the edge of the desert, in the starlight, before the dawn. It was only a wailing voice in the air. The spirits of the desert were addressed in their own language, or was it themselves lamenting, like water spirits to the green boughs overhanging them, that they could never know the gladness of the green world, but were forever demons and denizens of the desert? But the tones trembled away without echo or response into the starry solitude; -Al-lá-hu ak-bar, Al-lá-hu ak-bar!

So with songs and pictures, with musings, and the dinner of a Mecca pilgrim, passed the first evening upon the Nile. The Ibis clung to the bank at Boulak all that night. We called her Ibis because the sharp lateen sails are most like wings, upon the Egyptian Nile was no winged thing of fairer fame. We prayed Osiris that the law of his religion might yet be enforced against winds and waves. For whoever killed an Ibis, by accident or willfully, necessarily suffered death.

The Lotus is a sweeter name, but consider all the

poets who have so baptized their boats! Besides, soothly saying, this dahabieh of ours, hath no flower semblance, and is rather fat than fairy. The zealous have even called their craft Papyrus, but poverty has no law.

V.

THE CREW.

WE are not quite off yet. Eastern life is leisurely. It has the long crane neck of enjoyment—and you, impatient reader, must leave your hasty habits, and no longer bolt your pleasure as you do your Tremont or Astor dinner, but taste it all the way down, as our turbaned friends do. Ask your dragoman casually, and he will regale you with choice instances of this happy habitude of the Orientals—or read the Arabian Nights in the original, or understand literally the romances that the poets recite at at the cafés, and you will learn how much you are born to lose-being born as you were, an American, with no time to live.

Your Nile crew is a dozen nondescripts. They are Arabs-Egyptians-Nubians, and half-breeds of all kinds. They wear a white or red cap, and a long flowing garment which the Howadji naturally calls "night-gown," but which they term "zaaboot"-although as Mrs. Bull said, she thought

It is a convenient

night-gown the better name. dress for river mariners; for they have only to throw it off, and are at once ready to leap into the stream if the boat grounds-with no more incumbrance than Undine's uncle Kühleborn always had. On great occasions of reaching a town they wear the 'eree or drawers, and a turban of white cotton.

Our reis was a placid little Nubian, with illimitable lips, and a round, soft eye. He was a feminine creature, and crept felinely about the boat on his little spongy feet, often sitting all day upon the bow, somnolently smoking his chibouque, and letting us run aground. He was a Hadji too; but, except that he did no work, seemed to have no especial respect from the crew. He put his finger into the dish with them, and fared no better. Had he been a burly brute, the savages would have feared him; and, with them, fear is the synonym of respect.

The grisly Ancient Mariner was the real captain -an old, gray Egyptian, who crouched all day long over the tiller, with a pipe in his mouth, and his firm eye fixed upon the river and the shore. He looked like a heap of ragged blankets, smouldering away internally, and emitting smoke at a chance orifice. But at evening he descended to the deck, took a cup of coffee, and chatted till midnight. As