that now he had reached land he must prepare to wrestle with some wasting disease, I exhausted in vain all my powers of persuasion, backed by a lengthy geographical disquisition. He admitted, somewhat reluctantly, that the sun was as hot and as bright here as in Cairo; he granted that his appetite was excellent, and that he felt as yet no indisposition: but he maintained the soothsayer was a wise man. He had told Garabet, whose leg had been cut off, that he would die, and Garabet died. Therefore when he said Hanna would be ill it must be true.

At length I lost patience. "Hanna Habbashe," I cried, "I did wrong to take you from your thieving and your nakedness at Massowah; I did wrong to trust you as my servant. You are as ignorant as the Dinkas, you are as vicious as the camel, you are as stupid as the hyena, and your wicked heart is as black as your face."

For a moment Hanna stood silent. Then the scowl of sullen obstinacy faded from his brow, and I saw that I had prevailed.

"Hanna's face is a little black," he said, diffidently, "but his heart is nice. It is an English heart, and white like the Bey's."

From this moment the warnings of the soothsayer were forgotten. Hanna had no further thought of illness; and as in Marseilles he found many companions of his own colour, the few days of our stay there passed pleasantly enough with him. Very speedily his objections to, and fears of, the rigour of English weather disappeared; and when at length, with a biting wind blowing in our teeth, and a driving storm of sleet and hail

stinging our cheeks and eyelids, we emerged shivering at daybreak from Charing Cross Station into. the Strand, Hanna turned to me sleepily, but with a merry smile. "Is this England?" he asked, turning up the collar of his cloak.

"This is London," I said, emphatically.

"Ah!" said Hanna, with de"Then we shall see the

light.

great white Queen."

It being obviously out of my power to procure for him this supreme satisfaction, I sent him as an alternative to the pantomime at Drury Lane Theatre, where the gorgeous pageantry provided by Sir Augustus Harris certainly impressed him far more deeply than aught he could have seen in a European Court. It may be said, too, that he never knew he had been deceived. He was delighted beyond measure with this splendid entertainment, which he visited on no less than six successive nights. Each morning he would stand at the foot of my bed and give me a detailed account of the doings of the great Queen (Mr Harry Nicholls, I believe) and the King her husband, and the brilliant courtiers, and the army with glittering armour of gold and silver, and shapely pink legs. He was always curious, indeed, to know why these troops had not accompanied Lord Wolseley to the Sudan, where they would, he said, have been so well adapted to the pretty little boats provided for the carriage of the expedition. He was amazed and awestruck by the transformation-scene, and would describe with bated breath the Djinnoun1 floating in mid-air in the shapes of beautiful maidens, and the fountains of coloured flame,

the glittering foliage of gold silver. Some giant attendants the comic monarch, however, big wobbling heads, troubled not a little. Of course he Id know nothing of the divinthat hedges round a king; but here was an example of the ger of a little learning) there in his dark mind, I fear, as he ed on these wicker effigies, a coned memory of the teachings of papas and the aboona and the erican missionary. "I was not ■id,” said Hanna, alluding to the ee grotesque monsters; "I am Christian, too, like the Bey." ad noticed some months before t the contemplation of the three e seated figures at Abou Simbel roused in him feelings of a like zed nature, and I had been at e trouble to avoid any discus1 on the subject. But as a alt of his pantomime experies, I have no doubt that when nna left England he was conced that he had basked for eral days in the sunlight of alty, and that he had even conuted, by the payments of himand his companion at the pit rance, in no small measure to support of the English Crown. The pantomime over, I discovered t a performance styled Kharm was being presented at an lying place of entertainment. this I accompanied Hanna with iend, and we occupied a stage. The hero of the entertainnt, we soon found, was a war respondent, in a helmet and -kee suit and shiny patentcher boots. Hanna, very justily, took quite early in the pernance a rabid dislike to this sonage, who never did any work, passed his time in rhapsodising -ut the dangers of his calling the beauty of his beloved. d when the war correspondent,

having lain down to sleep, notebook, helmet, patent boots and all, beside a tinfoil camp-fire in the centre of the stage, the Arab enemy, led by a treacherous guide, stole on in the limelight and searched for him painfully amid pasteboard rocks and painted bushes at the back, and, though every one could see him quite plainly, failed to discover his bivouac.

Hanna directed them loudly in Arabic to where he lay, and shouted to them to go and kill him, and abused them roundly for fools when they took no heed. And when, at length discovered, the war correspondent arose and fought, and after emptying at them a thirty-two chambered revolver (we counted the shots), dispersed some hundred assailants with his note-book-a weapon he should have thought of sooner-Hanna was greatly disconcerted. "They are not Arabs," he said emphatically, as the discomfited supers slunk away into the wings. "They are not Arabs. They are not even Egyptians. Kooluhoum Ghreeki— They are all Greeks."

A few days later I escorted my protégé to the Zoological Gardens. The first object we encountered as we entered was an elephant slouching placidly along, regardless of the burden of some dozen schoolgirls. Hanna looked at the great beast in silent wonder, and it was evident to me that the English rose greatly in his estimation at the sight. "Do children tame the Fil here?" he

said at length. "In my country we kill him and take his teeth."

He hissed at the camels when he came to them, making them kneel down with much docility, despite the warnings of their keepers that they were very savage. He laughed at the brown bears, though he expressed wonder at the white polar beast. He

stood unmoved before the hippopotamus and rhinoceros, and and blinked lazily at the giraffe, which he said was a foolish beast deprived by Eblis of brains. With the ostrich, the stork, the pelican, and the flamingoes he was familiar, and expressed surprise only that they should stay where they were, in so cold a country. Finally, having visited every other object likely to interest him in the Gardens, I led him to the lionhouse.

As

It was near feeding-time. we entered, in the cage nearest the door lay a big male lion, his muzzle pressed against the bars. From time to time he uttered a

low whining roar. In the cage

next to him was a female in a state of terrible excitement, now rearing herself upright against the bars, now dragging herself along the front of the cage by her paws, now beating furiously at the iron door in the rear.

Hanna stood for a moment motionless, watching these two brutes. Then he made three steps to the door, picked up a handful of gravel, and returned. "I know you," he said "I have known you always. God's curse be on you! Have you come to this country too?" and he threw the gravel in the male lion's blinking eyes.

After this he refused to stay in the Gardens. "He was not armed," he said, "and the lions might come round by a back way and meet him with no weapon but a shemseeyé." 1

When the time arrived at length for Hanna to return to Egypt-if not indeed to Massowah-a question arose as to the investment of

his capital. For he was in a manner a capitalist. He had spent no

VOL. CLVI.-NO. DCCCCXLIX.

money for three years, and his accumulated savings made a useful sum. I suggested various schemes for the preservation and increase of this little estate, but to all of them Hanna, though expressing much sensibility of my kindness, remained cold. He had a plan himself, he said, which he hoped I would aid him to put in execution. He had observed not only in England, but in Cairo and Alexandria, that piano-organs were a valuable property, and he expressed a desire to purchase some of these instruments and carry them with him. I raised some objections against the plan, urging that he himself could only manipulate one organ at a time, and that if he let out the others they would be very liable to injury, or even destruction, in those quarters of the Egyptian towns where their music was most appreciated. But this argument he cleverly combated, saying that he would only hire his property to Greeks, who had wives and young children, and whose furniture he could hold as a mortgage.

After all, when regarded from this point of view, the plan was a good one. The cost of a pianoorgan was about £12, while the rent of one in Cairo, said Hanna, where they were scarce, was three dollars per week. So after some diligent search for the instruments are chiefly made in Vienna I discovered an importer in the neighbourhood of Hatton Gardens, from whom I purchased five instruments, to be delivered on board the ship by which Hanna was to sail from Liverpool, for the sum of £65.

With these, then, and a fair sum of money, and with several suits of very fashionable clothes and in

2 Y

numerable presents from friends of all ranks, including a silvergilt repeater - watch and chain, which I handed to him in the cab on the way to the station, Hanna prepared to return to Egypt, to seek there his fortune. When we were nearing the station I noticed that he was unduly agitated, and by cross-examination elicited that his desire was to invest in some boots of a very showy red leather, exhibited in the windows of cheap ready-made dealers. It was easy to satisfy so modest a taste, and as time permitted, we stopped and made the purchase. Hanna nursed his new acquisitions in his arms throughout the rest of the drive, and had no sooner taken his seat in the railway carriage than he commenced a minute examination of their workmanship. As the train moved out of the station he rose from his seat and stretched his body out of the window.

I hurried along the platform to catch his farewell.

"Ya Bey," he said, sadly, "they are not like the Suakim boots. Those were good. They would

"Mr Feruncis Scudamore Times

Special correspondent: En London. My Sir I have the honor to be Sir verj setfully your obedient servant. My Sir I have the plesure to ask your in good Hulth. But I am much obeliged by yuur kindess. that you make me verj useful and I thunke you olwys. You mj a great Sir.

And I am now obedient at Cairo. But not yet I did not find work But I am verj glod by yuur name sir. if you sent a letter for me you con sent it in Captain Chercha. But my sir, I may have a recve a letter to sent me Beneh from you my sir. Biano Lanterna1 are in good Hulth but my sir, one broke liver and bowils run away.

"Remen yours servant

"HANNA Abyssinian."

FRANCIS SCUDAMORE.

One fine morning, then, about the middle of last September, I booked myself and a faithful middle-aged spaniel from a London terminus to a small station in the mid-west of Great Britain, bound for a wellremembered spot which I had never yet left without inwardly resolving to get back again as soon as I could. I was in the best of humours at the prospect of being once more at my old quarters; and though the railway runs through a great variety of rich and luxuriant, and sometimes even beautiful, scenery between London and Shrewsbury, I was impatient for the first glimpse of Wales, and it was not until we crossed the Dee that I felt my holiday had fairly begun.

The change in the aspect of the country at this point is complete. I have crossed the boundary farther south without being conscious of any immediate alteration in the character of the scenery. But on leaving Chester we are greeted by nature with a totally different countenance-different in colour, in form, in the smallest details as well as in general effect, from the England we have left behind us. The prevailing tints

on

we

now are light green and grey. The hills our left, as speed on our way, are prettily wooded: but we miss the dark foliage of the English hedgerow timber, the old red brick farm-houses, which, covered with crumbling lichens, are rather roan than red; the snug villages with the tall church tower or spire. In place

of these we have between the hills and the sea small flat enclosures, divided very often by walls; and everywhere whitewashed cottages and houses with slated roofs, imparting an air of coldness to the landscape even on a summer day. The churches are small, and not often visible from the railway. But then at every turn on our journey we come upon little picturesque nooks which compensate for all: little pictures done by nature's hand, in which hanging wood, moss-covered rock, fretting streamlet, and banks of tangled gorse and fern are blended together in such exquisite confusion that the eye could feast on it for ever. These tiny glens and dingles greet one with increasing frequency as we penetrate farther into the country; and of course, on approaching the Conway, we are in the immediate vicinity of some of the most beautiful scenery in North Wales. Bettys-y-Coed in particular, at the junction of the Conway and the Lugwy, I have always thought one of the loveliest spots in the Principality. But our way does not lie thither. We run straight on, at first through a country diversified by many such pretty little bits of natural composition as we have here described. But by degrees it grows wilder and more desolate. Swamps and bogs ap