ers as remembrances to Mrs. Grant, and as much leavetaking as though we were bound from New York to Liverpool. Some one makes this suggestion when the observation is made that we are about to undertake a journey as long as from New York to Liverpool and return. The General sits in a corner with Stone and Loring, talking about old days in the army and making comments upon famed and illustrious names that the historian would welcome if I could only dare to gather up crumbs of this interesting conversation. At noon the signal for our journey is given and farewells are spoken, and we head under full steam for the Equator.

Our party.is thus composed-we have the General, his wife, and his son, Jesse. The Khedive has assigned us an officer of his household (Sami Bey), a Circassian gentleman educated in England. Sami Bey is one of the heroes

of our trip, and we soon came to like him, Moslem as he is, for his quaint, cordial, kindly ways. I suppose wo should call Sami Bey the executive officer of the expedition, as to him all responsibility is given. We have also with us, thanks to the kindness of the Khedive, Emile Brugsch, one of the directors of the Egyptian Museum. Mr. Brugsch is a German, brother to the chief director, who has made the antiquities of Egypt a study. Mr. Brugsch knows every tomb and column in the land. He has lived for weeks in the temples and ruins, superintending excavations, copying inscriptions, deciphering hieroglyphics, and his presence with us is an advantage that cannot be over-estimated, for it is given to him to point with his cane and unravel mystery after mystery of the marvels engraved on the stones and rocks, while we stand by in humble and listening wonder. "What a blank our trip would be without Brugsch!" said the General one day, as we were coming back from a ruin-a ruin as absolute and meaningless as the Aztec mounds in New Mexico, but which our fine young friend had made as luminous as a page in Herodotus. The Consul General, E. E. Farman, formerly editor of the Western New Yorker, is also of our party, and I have already spoken of the pleasant impression he made upon General Grant in Cairo. The General had so agreeable a time with the good boys of the Vandalia that he asked Commander Robeson to come and bring with him as many of his officers as could be spared. He was anxious to have Robeson, and all kinds of schemes and persuasions were invented to secure him. When the gracious commands of the lady of our expedition were put upon him the Commander paused, and I think for one whole evening he had resolved to go up the Nile. But the morning came, and it brought the cold fact that the Commander had a ship to

command, and that it was his duty to command it, and the Nile was in no sense a navigable water. So Robeson gave up the Nile and sent three of his officers to accept the General's invitation - the Chief Surgeon, George H. Cooke; Lieutenant W. A. Hadden and Ensign F. A.

Wilner-who, with the writer (in all ten), form the party who make this Nile excursion. That is to say, we form that fragment of the party who live in the main cabin. The Consul General is accompanied by a kind of Arabian Sancho Panza named Hassan. I am afraid it is because the Consul-General is tall and thin, and Hassan is short, and brown, and stout, that we call the latter Sancho Panza. However, the comparison comes from illustrious lips, and was made one evening when our Consul General and Hassan were coming over the plains of Dandoreh, mounted on donkeys. Hassan has been eighteen years in the legation. He speaks a ready, expressive, but limited,

English, wears an Arabian costume, including a scimetar, and is proud of two things-first, that he wears a gold American eagle mounted on a pin, by which he was decorated by Consul General Butler, and second, that he captured John H. Surrat. Hassan is a Moslem, the husband of two wives, and believes in Dr. Lansing, the missionary, who educates his children. No one ever heard Hassan speak ill of a consul general. For eighteen years he has seen dynasties rise and fall, from De Leon to Hale, from Butler to Farman, and he has only good words for them all, living and dead. Hassan is proud of his mission as a member of the General's party, and walks the deck sabred and turbaned like Othello. The Marquis makes no secret of the fact that his heart is in our palace of Kasrrel Noussa. He would gladly have waited there until our return, but I suppose it never occurred to the General, and so he paces the deck with colored glasses and an umbrella under his arm, wondering how people can go for weeks on a boat, and ride donkeys, and wander among dust-heaped ruins, when a palace is in readiness and you have only to clap your hands for slaves to answer your call.

Our boat is called Zinet el Bohren, or as my omniscient friend translates it, the Light of Two Rivers. It is a long, narrow steamer, with two cabins, drawing only a few feet of water, with a flat bottomed keel. The Nile is a river of sand and mud, and as the bottom is always changing you must expect to run aground every little while and to run off again. This in fact we do, and the announcement that we are aground makes about as much impression upon us as if a passenger in a Broadway omnibus heard the wheel of his coach interlock with another. The Nile boats seem arranged to meet any emergency in the way of land -for this river is sprawling, eccentric, comprehensive,

without any special channel-running one way to-day, another next day. To know the river, therefore, must be something like knowing the temper of a whimsical woman -you must court and woo her and wait upon her humors. Navigation is a constant seeking after knowledge. We have a captain in a comely uniform, with a clear cut Arab face, who stands in the middle of the boat and shouts. We have two men with poles who lean over the prow and sink their poles in the water, and now and then shout. Then at the wheel we have one, or perhaps two, steersmen, generally fine, grave, swarthy fellows, who do not shout much, but, knowing the river's coquettish ways, do as they please, unmindful of the shouting. For an hour, for two or three hours, we hum along with an casy, trembling motion, the smooth, shining river lapping our sides, and the low, green banks falling behind us. Then we have a

tremor, a sidling to one side, and the engines stop. This was so serious a business, especially to our seafaring friends, that for the first or second time they regarded it as a call to quarters or a fire alarm, but we soon became used to it, and running aground hardly interrupted the idlest conversation. When evening comes, our captain picks out the best point that can be found after sunset, and runs up to the land. The crew are sent ashore with torches and hammers, posts are driven into the soft clay and we are tied to the shore. There, as if out of the earth they come, we have a group of Bedouins in their turbans, who gather on the river bank and make a bonfire of dried sugar cane or cornstalks and keep watch over us during the night. The first night we tied up, Mr. Grant, the younger, and your correspondent went ashore, seeking out Hassan to keep us company. There was our group of crouching Arabs over the fire, their dark features lighting up into a strange but not unimpressive kind of beauty. We had