we hasten over the last twenty miles of our trip. A dangerous gust of wind recalls to our minds the point called Gebel TookhAboofeyda, near to Girgeh, where the winds rise frequently into whirlwinds, as the storms blow around the precipitous cliffs and strike fear to the hearts of the not too courageous Arabian sailors. Yet our crew seem to fight with changeable winds like true muscular seamen. They are good-natured fellows, ready to run of an errand or after our game, or to bear us ashore on their great brawny backs. The crew consists of twelve-a captain, steersman, eight sailors, cook, and waiter. And there is our dragoman and a bright little Nubian boy, always at our elbow to fetch us a book or an orange as we lie in our ship chairs upon deck. The sailors coil up in a rough sack on the deck to sleep, and are up at the slightest call to their duty to shift the lateens, or to jump into the stream and lift off the boat from some treacherous sand-bar.

Their food consists of coarse flour baked with water, which is then crumbled and dried in the sun, afterward boiled and mixed with beans or lentils. The sailors sit around the kettle-pot and partake of this in the most primitive fashion, each dipping the first two fingers of the right hand into the pot. An occasional contribution of a sheep is received by them with great manifestation of gratitude; and their happiness seems completed by a few piastres for the purchase of some onions and sugar-cane. Favorable winds give light labor to our sailors, and they recompense us amply with singing and dancing and ludicrous attempts at impromptu theatricals-chiefly burlesques of a king, who, perhaps, is ultimately poisoned or assassinated amid the applause and laughter of the whole stock company, king and all.

And thus, with daily some newly discovered enjoyment, an hour's hunting, a ludicrous donkey race or excursion ashore, a quaint vein of native humor, or perhaps some touching poem of sorrow caught in passing; impressive ruin, picturesque landscape, or rare sunset, our slow drift moves onward," until we may hail once again the distant Cairo, with its delicate minarets, and the cupola of the citadel mosque of Mohammed rising up like the wonderful dome of St. Peter's.

66

Once more we may roam through the quaint streets and entertaining bazaars of "old Cairo," re-enjoying their objects of

CAIRO, March 15.

We are glad to be once again in our quiet and immovable rooms at Shepherd's Hotel, and we partake with relish of the busy scenes of cosmopolitan life. We canter about gayly on the trim little donkeys, punched on by half naked little "fellahs." Here, shouting, comes the lithe carriage runner, who, bred to the business, can outrun the horses for hours, as he hurries along to make room for a Pasha, who lolls complaisantly back in his carriage as it rolls through the crowds that press back for its passage.

There, walks a lady of Cairo, closely vailed, and attended by a toothless old woman, who watches her closely. And here goes a merchant prince, slipping awkwardly along on a richly caparisoned camel. And here is a waterman under our noses who pours us a drink for a "thank you;" and his friend, the street sprinkler, staggers hard by with an enormous load in a goat-skin, from which he scatters a crystalline shower upon the dusty highways.

There, is the milk-cart of Cairo-a mildfeatured nanny goat, who suffers herself to be led to your threshold, there to be milked by the gray-turbaned Arab, and thus gives you her best, undiluted.

On every side is to be seen thus some primitive and homely custom; the very body-servant sleeps leaning against the door of the master's apartments; and the street

sionist, take part in the merry procession by pushing the bright little donkeys among them. The beasts take the brunt of the beating with gentleness, but appear not to relish the fun.

All aboard! we descend to our carriages, and are whirled off through the throngs of donkeys and camels; the peddlers, snake. charmers, tricksters, hawkers, and motley groups of travelers by the hotel, and soon are ensconced in the rail-car-that sad innovation upon Eastern romance.

SUEZ CANAL, March 27. Seven hours' flight through fertile fields, and over the Syrian Desert, and we arrive at Ismailia, equidistant from Port Said and

Suez, on Lake Timsah, a clean little town in the very desert, but bright with made gardens and flowers. It flourished during the building of the canal, but is now silent, though proud in the home of De Lesseps.

The day following, our tug-boat moves through in the wake of a magnificent steamship, which meets with no obstruction whatever, to Port Said, where the French steamer lies waiting to bear us to Jaffa.

With a glimpse at the town, and its harbor, made out into the sea with great walls of manufactured stone, we mount the tall sides of the steamer; the low, yellow desert sinks into the sea, and the glories of Egypt are lost to our sight.

“Ay, Ay, I'll tell you, shipmates,
If you care to hear the tale,
How myself and the royal yard alone
Were left of the old Narwhale.

"A stouter ship was never launched Of all the Clyde-built whalers,

And forty years of a life at sea

Haven't matched her crowd of sailors.
Picked men they were, all young and strong,
And used to the wildest seas,

From Donegal and the Scottish coast,
And the rugged Hebrides.

Such men as women cling to, mates,

Like ivy round their lives;

And the day we sailed, the quays were lined

With weeping mothers and wives.

They cried and prayed, and we gave 'em a cheer,
In the thoughtless way o' men.

God help them, shipmates-thirty years
They've waited and prayed since then.

"We sailed to the North, and I mind it well,
The pity we felt and pride

When we sighted the cliffs of Labrador
From the sea where Hudson died.

We talked of ships that never came back,
And when the great floes passed,

Like ghosts in the night, each moonlit peak
Like a great war-frigate's mast,

'Twas said that a ship was frozen up
In the iceberg's awful breast,

The clear ice holding the sailor's face
As he lay in his mortal rest.

And I've thought since then, when the ships came

home,

That sailed for the Franklin band,

A mistake was made in the reckoning
That looked for the crews on land.

"They're floating still,' I've said to myself,
'And Sir John has found the goal;
The Erebus and the Terror, mates,
Are icebergs up at the Pole!'

"We sailed due north, to Baffin's Bay, And cruised through weeks of light; 'Twas always day, and we slept by the bell, And longed for the dear old night, And the blessed darkness, left behind, Like a curtain round the bed;

But a month dragged on like an afternoon
With the wheeling sun o'erhead.

We found the whales were farther still,
The farther north we sailed:
Along the Greenland glacier coast,
The boldest might have quailed,
Such Shapes did keep us company
No sail in all that sea,

But thick as ships in Mersey's tide
The bergs moved awfully

Within the current's northward stream;
But, ere the long day's close,

We found the whales and filled the ship
Amid the friendly floes.

"Then came a rest: the day was blown
Like a cloud before the night;

In the south the sun went redly down-
In the north rose another light,
Neither sun nor moon, but a shooting dawn,
That silvered our lonely way.

It seemed we sailed in a belt of gloom,
Upon either side, a day.

The north wind smote the sea to death;

The pack-ice closed us round

The Narwhale stood in the level fields

As fast as a ship aground.

A weary time it was to wait,

And to wish for spring to come,

With the pleasant breeze and the blessed sun, To open the way toward home.

"Spring came at last, the ice-fields groaned Like living things in pain;

They moaned and swayed, then rent amain, And the Narwhale sailed again.

With joy the dripping sails were loosed,
And round the vessel swung;

To cheer the crew, full south she drew,
The shattered floes among.
We had no books in those old days
To carry the friendly faces;

But I think the wives and lasses then
Were held in better places.

The face of sweetheart and wife to-day
Is locked in the sailors' chest ;

But aloft on the yard, with the thought of home,
The face in the heart was best.

Well, well-God knows, mates, when and where To take the things He gave ;

We steered for Home-but the chart was His, And the port ahead-the Grave!

"We cleared the floes; through an open sea
The Narwhale south'ard sailed,

Till a day came round when the white fog rose,
And the wind astern had failed.
In front of the Greenland glacier line

And close to its base were we;

Through the misty pall we could see the wall
That beetled above the sea.

A fear like the fog crept over our hearts
As we heard the hollow roar

Of the deep sea thrashing the cliffs of ice
For leagues along the shore.

"The years have come, and the years have gone, But it never wears away

The sense I have of the sights and sounds
That marked that woful day.

Flung here and there at the ocean's will,
As it flung the broken floe-
What strength had we 'gainst the tiger sea
That sports with a sailor's woe?
The lifeless berg and the lifeful ship
Were the same to the sullen wave,

As it swept them far from ridge to ridge,
Till at last the Narwhale drave
With a crashing rail on the glacier wall,
As sheer as the vessel's mast-

A crashing rail and a shivered yard;

But the worst, we thought, was past.
The brave lads sprang to the fending work,
And the skipper's voice rang hard:
'Aloft there, one with a ready knife-
Cut loose that royal yard!'

I sprang to the rigging, young I was,
And proud to be first to dare:

The yard swung free, and I turned to gaze
Toward the open sea, o'er the field of haze,
And my heart grew cold, as if frozen through,
At the moving Shape that met my view-
O Christ! what a sight was there!
"Above the fog, as I hugged the yard,
I saw that an iceberg lay-
A berg like a mountain, closing fast-
Not a cable's length away!

I could not see through the sheet of mist
That covered all below,

But I heard their cheery voices still,
And I screamed to let them know.
The cry went down, and the skipper hailed,
But before the word could come

It died in his throat, and I knew they saw
The shape of the closing Doom!

"No scund but that-but the hail that died
Came up through the mist to me:
Thank God, it covered the ship like a vail,
And I was not forced to see-

But I heard it, mates: O, I heard the rush
And the timbers rend and rive,
As the yard clung to swayed and fell

"I lay on the ice alive!

Alive! O Lord of mercy! ship and crew and
sea were gone!

The hummocked ice and the broken yard,
And a kneeling man-alone!

"A kneeling man on a frozen hill

The sounds of life in the air

All Death and Ice-and a minute before
The sea and the ship were there!

I could not think they were dead and gone,
And I listened for sound or word;