a small child); she had only one chair, which she gave me, as the stranger; seating our old friend on the table, she mounted to the top of a high ladder herself, from whence she chattered and laughed with the happy air of one who is sure to please. Miss Raincock had once received a note from Gibson,—'That poor American girl has fever, come and nurse her,' so she had packed up her old carpet-bag and gone at once to obey the order, thus forming a friendship for life."
But Miss North's turn for satirical portraiture was by no means reserved for Americans. Among the most amusing of her "Innocents Abroad" was a Frenchman, a fellow-passenger on the Nile boat, who was, she rather naïvely complains, "absurdly national and unlike us in everything." Curiously enough, Monsieur, on his side, seems to have been observing his English companions, and making, mutatis mutandis, the same conclusions about them. Says Miss North:
"He got up late in the morning, and came into the saloon in demi-toilette as we were finishing our breakfast, having been 'strangled' and frozen entirely by the cold, and, mon Dieu! he had no appetite! he would take a glass of lemonade and his narghile, and lecture us in the most polite and unreasonable way about the bêtise and English barbarism of fatiguing the stomach so early in the morning by eating; after a little while he would get faint with hunger, and declare the cold would kill him, and, mon Dieu! he would die if he got nothing to eat till so late, and Achmet ya Achmet! and then he began gorging like a boa-constrictor, stopping every now and then to explain how much better the food would have been if, etc., after which he began smoking again, and tried to draw, but, mon Dieu! he had no time; if he only had time he could do something of true merit. . . . Mr. S. confided to me that the Frenchman went to bed clothes and all, and that his toilette in the morning consisted of a thorough brushing downwards with the same brush, beginning with his hair, then his green velvet coat, and lastly his dear shining boots, c'est tout, voilà! He also complained that he could not get filtered water to wash in; if he could not get it filtered he would not wash his 'figure' at all. He was told Madame only used that of the Nile for hers. 'Madame was too good to complain, and besides she was an Englishwoman, bah'!"
Miss North visited Egypt in 1865, and she gives a lively account of the country and people and of her own experiences. The route from Alexandria ("a nasty, mongrel, mosquito-ish place") to Cairo reminded her of the fens of Ely; but the country was richly cropped with cotton and Indian corn, with scarcely a tree to break the monotony of the view, and but few villages. The cottages were merely square blocks of hardened mud, windowless and with the flat roofs covered with pigeons, chickens, and cats; primitive ploughs, like the ancient models in old Egyptian carvings, were scratching the rich soil.
"The natives had that calm, soft type of countenance that marks the old statuary of their country, large eyes and gentle expression, but no strength of character, and one could easily see that the old sculptors had before their eyes the ancestors of the present race, and that, though the ruling classes might be changed in Egypt, the fellahs or original population of the land are of the same blood as their forefathers."
Books might be filled, says Miss North, with the architectural wonders of Cairo, its elaborate arabesques, and lacelike patterns in stone-work, plaster, and wood-carving. The tombs outside the city were the greatest gems of all, though they were only visited by flights of falcons or stray Arab wanderers. Europeans seemed popular with the people, who were fond of showing off any words they knew. Miss North's donkeyman, like most of his tribe, was a special linguist. He knew "a few words of many languages, and made the most of them by transposing and reversing their order in a sentence; for instance, 'gentleman like donkey,' 'no gentleman like donkey,' 'donkey no like gentleman.' He told his beast where to go, and the clever creature trotted off right or left accordingly. 'Donkey speak English,' then the donkey always put its ears back and kicked out behind,"—a proceeding reminding one of the intelligent animal that carried Silas Wegg to "Boffinses Bower" on a memorable occasion.
The author confesses to having regarded things Egyptian "from a purely picturesque point," and was scolded for this by the Cairo clergyman's wife:
"'Dear, dear, like all travellers, you wander hither and thither and see nothing with a proper object, everything from a false point of view. I suppose you never considered that on the precise spot where those Mameluke tombs stand the Israelites made their bricks without straw!' And her husband took us to the top of a hill and showed us the very stone on which Moses stood to count the Israelites as they passed out of Egypt."
The start from Cairo was made the day after Christmas, and the author's record of the ensuing Nile voyage is studded with characteristic bits of vivid, semi-humourous description. At Luxor, Miss North visited the eccentric Lady Duff Gordon, whom she had seen twenty-five years before. Lady Lucie was picturesquely installed in some rooms raised up amongst the pillars of an old temple, "like a second story":
"She herself was old and gray, but had still the handsome face which had captivated me then, in spite of having burst two blood-vessels that year, and she said the air at Luxor did wonders for her. The natives all worshipped her, and she doctored them, amused them, and even smoked with them. They looked on her as something mysterious, and even rather uncanny, and respected her accordingly."
Later, at Karnak, Miss North was rather
