the Sultan grudges so sorely, are moored for the present under the shelter of the Alexandrian forts. Still, if all the frigates, ironclads, and gunboats had been removed, the Port of Egypt would have been crowded with vessels. There was nothing like the variety and picturesqueness of shipping to be seen in the Bosphorus; but even an inexperienced eye could see that the average burden and tonnage of the ships were of far greater amount. About the European quarter there is little that need be said, except that it is prosperous and handsome, and comparatively clean. The houses are built of stone or brick, instead of wood; the streets are broad and fairly well paved; the lamps are lit with gas; the shop windows are decked out with European goods arrayed after the Western fashion. Excellent open carriages ply at every corner for hire; and the donkeys of which old books of Eastern travel have told us so much are no longer the fashionable means of locomotion in Alexandria. The very nomenclature of the streets is cosmopolitan. I noticed close together, in one quarter, the Rue Bonaparte, Rue Bismarck, and Rue Napier. Napoleons and rupees are respectively the staples of the gold and silver currency. There are English hotels, French cafés, German beerhouses, and Italian ristoratores ;

and, as usual in towns of this sort, the only people who seem not to be at home are the natives.

Between the city and the suburb of Rammle, which bears about the same relation to Alexandria as New Brighton does to Liverpool, there runs the most nondescript line of railroad it has ever been my fate to traverse. Some of its trains are worked by steam-power, others by horse-power; and the trains in which you are dragged by horses cost double the price of the others. The porters and ticket takers are all Italian; the inscriptions over the offices and waiting-rooms, the directions to travellers, the bye-laws of the Rammle Railway Company, are all written in Italian: but the rolling stock is English; the carriages are of genuine British make, with "first class" and "second class" painted on their doors, and belonged once, as you may see by looking at the iron plates between the buffers, to the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railroad. After true English fashion, carriages constructed for the chill, bleak moorland of England are selected for this hot, clear climate, where air and space are the two things most desirable. But the force of circumstances has compelled the management to submit so far to the exigencies of the case, as to add to their good old-fashioned, close,

stuffy carriages, a number of long, windowless, American cars in which you can breathe at any rate. Surely no line, not even in the United States, ever had an odder collection of names for its roadside stations: Rammle is genuine Egyptian, Bulkley is as unequivocally British, Schegger is emphatically Teutonic, Bella Vista is Italian ; but to what nation in the world can you ascribe the name Sidney o Schurtz," which belongs to the eastern terminus of the line in question? All along the line, the strip of land between it and the seashore is covered with villas, over which wave the national flags of the owners, the Union Jack being perhaps the most frequently seen. Within the memory of young men in Alexandria, this Rammle was a portion of the desert; but the ground has been reclaimed, and is now converted into a site for the summer residences of the Scanderene merchants.

Yet even on this most un-Oriental of lines you have the East always present to you. It is so with everything at Alexandria. I am not speaking alone of the glaring sunlight, of the cloudless, dazzling sky, of the rich sunburnt hue and colour. But everywhere in the midst of this European civilization you come upon the footsteps of the East. Amidst the gaily-dressed French and Italian ladies, with whom the train is crowded, you

meet here and there native Egyptian women, with their faces shrouded from view in a manner you scarcely ever see in Constantinople: the lower half of the veil, from the eyes downward, is black; across the forehead, from the bridge of the nose to the parting of the hair, they have fastened, in some way or other, a small gilt tube, to which the upper portion of the veil is fastened by strings. All along the roads are groves of palm-trees and patches of desert, on which the tents of the Bedouins are pitched; at the crossways there are strings of camels waiting for the train to pass; the roofs of every dwelling, European or Egyptian, are flat and chimneyless; and there, in a stonemason's yard hard by the station, stands a squat, short obelisk, which, you are told, is Cleopatra's Needle.

So you are kept in a perpetual state of mental worry as to whether you are in Europe or in Africa. There, at the corner of Lombard Street (sic), is the British Postoffice, and on the steps is a negro from the Soudan, black as coal, basking in the sunshine in a white shirt barely reaching to his knees. There is an English bookseller's, where copies of London penny newspapers, of a fortnight old, are offered for sale at fivepence each; and the entrance is blocked by the fruit-stall of a vendor

of dates, melons, and yams. There is a French café, with a "dame de comptoir" in rich array, and waiters with white ties, and crowds of Frenchmen drinking demi-tasses" and "petits verres ;" and as you look you are hustled out of the road by a string of camels striding slowly along beneath their heavy weights. The donkeys stand wherever there is a patch of shade, and, bestrid by Englishmen of unmistakeable cut and build, are driven by Arab boys running behind and shouting the oddest jargon of expletives of all lands that ever issued from Christian or un-Christian-mouth. There are rows of book-stalls which would look at home on the Quai Voltaire at Paris; cigar-shops, with portraits of Mazzini and Garibaldi, which ought rightly to be situated in the Via di Toledo at Naples, or the Corso at Milan. Hard by is an old-fashioned British tavern, where, as you are informed by a fly-blown bill in the window, chops and steaks may be had on the shortest notice; and the only difference from home which you perceive as you enter the sanded bar-parlour is, that the buzzing sound with which the room is filled arises not from flies, but from mosquitoes. So the East and the West are shaken up together in a strange olla podrida; and the result is the Port of Egypt.