would think he must have been the husband, stolen in there to work the ill.”
“I don’t know,” shivered Lady Jane. “Since you have been speaking, other dark fears have come upon me. Fears which I dare not look upon.”
Yes; various fears, and thoughts, and remembrances were stirring within her. A recollection of that scrap of letter, found by Lady Laura in her drawer of fine laces soon after becoming Mr. Carlton’s wife, rose up. Laura had always persisted that the paper must have come from Cedar Lodge amidst her clothes: how else, she argued, could it have got there? Now Jane began to think (what she would have thought previously but for its apparent impossibility) that the paper must have been in the drawer before Laura ever went into the house; that it must have slipped under the paper covering of the drawer, and lain there, it was impossible to say how long. It had never occurred to her or to Laura to connect Mr. Carlton with it at all; and the little matter had puzzled Jane more than she cared to think of. Could the letter have been written to Mr. Crane? surely it had not been written to Mr. Carlton! But how came it in the drawer? Had Mr. Crane ever visited Mr. Carlton at South Wennock? And again there was Clarice’s denial that her name was Crane. What had been Mr. Carlton’s part in it all? was the chief question that agitated Jane’s mind now. She stayed with Mrs. Smith, talking and talking, and it was growing dusk when she quitted the cottage to walk home. But as Lady Jane went down Blister Lane and turned on to the Rise, she started nervously at every shadow in the hedge, just as Mr. Carlton had started at them some years before.
EASTERN TRAVEL.
The wittiest of modern writers has somewhere observed that popular ideas share the fate of tables and sofas—they have their days, become antiquated, and are passed up into the garrets or down to the cellars. The notion that Eastern travel is attended with danger or difficulty, has long ago been discarded from parlours and drawing-rooms; and in narrating a few of my personal adventures in the Desert I am not about to make myself out a hero, but merely to recall certain pleasureable and picturesque recollections, such as no other locality I ever visited was capable of furnishing.
Finding, after some little stay at Cairo, that we had exhausted its sights, smells, and sounds, my friend R——— and myself came to a resolution that the Desert would prove an agreeable change; so after the usual fencing, rendered necessary by the consummate rascality of those races, we at length settled with one of the chief sheiks of the tribe of Toura and six of his Arabs to be our escort as far as Akaba, where his jurisdiction terminated.
On the appointed morning a string of camels knelt in front of the English hotel, well aware, in the depths of their vicious souls, what was in store for them. The popular notion of the patience and docility of the camel may, I think, likewise be included in those discarded beliefs which have taken refuge in the nurseries and attics. The curious naturalist may yet find it recorded in “Tommy Trip’s Museum” that the camel is a gentle and much-enduring animal; my experience of them—and I must have had dealings with more than twenty different specimens—has taught me that the great intelligence with which they are gifted is wholly and unceasingly employed in thwarting their rider; in expressing their malice, hatred, and uncharitableness towards him; and their general disapprobation of his presence and authority. They usually seize the moment when he struggles into his seat, to rise up suddenly and pitch him from the height he was on the point of attaining; or, failing this, their next move is to throw themselves down with a view of getting rid of him, uttering a roar far more objurgatory than any volley of imprecations, and with an expression of eye and mouth positively ludicrous, if one had time or inclination to laugh at such a moment.
This was by no means my first introduction to camel-riding; but the agonies always re-commence, and have to be endured afresh. To those who have ever listened to poor Albert Smith’s incomparable description of his sufferings, it would be quite superfluous to attempt to paint my own. If the brutes had the slightest notion of the lumps, and bumps, and scarifications which every step produces, it might cheer them up for their servitude. However, there was no help for it; so I thought of Samuel Pepys and his rabbit skins, and jogged on.
We passed the various (supposed) localities of the sacred incidents recorded in the Exodus—the Wady Amarah, the Ayun Mousa, the Wady Feiran, which, whether genuine or not as to their associations, it is some satisfaction to think are not very materially changed since that period of miraculous history—and arrived at the Convent of Mount Sinai.
Here we were to pass the night; but our mode of entrance was curious, and far from