for them: "a melancholy story" as Mrs. Fay calls it when writing to her sister. Between Cairo and Suez, on the very route they proposed to take, a caravan had been held up and some of its passengers murdered. She was pitiably agitated. But she did not give up her sight-seeing; she had got to Alexandria and meant to enjoy it. Cleopatra's Needles in the first place. What did the hieroglyphics on them signify? She applied to Mr. Brandy; but the Consul, following the best traditions of the residential Levant, "seemed to know no more than ourselves." His kindness was unfailing. Next day he produced donkeys—being Christians they were not allowed to ride horses—and the party trotted over three miles of desert to Pompey's Pillar, preceded by a janissary with a drawn sword. Pompey's Pillar arouses few emotions in the modem breast. The environs are squalid, the turnstile depressing, and one knows that it dates not from Pompey but from Diocletian. Mrs. Fay approached it in a nobler mood.
Although quite unadorned, the proportions are so exquisite that it must strike every beholder with a kind of awe, which softens into melancholy when one reflects that the renowned hero, whose name it bears, was treacherously murdered on this very coast by the boatmen who were conveying him to Alexandria. His wretched wife stood on the vessel he had just left, watching his departure, as we may very naturally suppose, with inexpressible anxiety. What must have been her agonies at the dreadful event!
The time was to come when Mrs. Fay herself would have watched with very little anxiety the murder of Mr. Fay. Her Anthony—for such was his name—led her from mess to mess, and in the end she had to divorce him. Let us turn from
