CHAPTER XIII.

GENERAL GRANT AND HIS PARTY-LIFE ON THE NILEDOMESTIC SCENES-FRIENDS ON THE WAY-NIGHT AND MORNING-TWILIGHT ON THE NILE-BEAUTIFUL SCENES-ADVENTURES DURING THE JOURNEY.

The Khedive, writes Mr. Young, has placed at the disposal of the General one of his steam vessels, and she swings out into the stream with the American flag at the fore. We have all been in a bustle and a hurry to get away. There was the leaving the place, the massing of bundles, the command of the impedimenta. We were alert for the trip, and we had been feeding our imaginations with visions of Eastern life, with visions of the faded but glorious remnants of the ancient civilization. Cairo was French. The infidel had gilded and wall-papered the city of the faithful, and it was hard to realize you were in an Oriental land where everybody spoke Italian and French, and Vienna beer was among the principal articles of merchandise. But now we were really to throw behind us the tawdry French manners and customs which invaded us in our palace, and to go for days and days upon the waters of the Nile. We bought each a fez, and some of us ventured upon the luxury of an Indian hat. Others went into colored spectacles, and the marquis, a far seeing man, who had been on the Nile, and who was not in the best of spirits at leaving a palace to float for weeks between Arab villages, appeared with an astonishing umbrella. We had many friends to see us off. General Stone, Judge Batcheller and Judge Barringer, with their wives; General Loring, and others. There were radiant mounds of flow

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 we 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 of ficers 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,