anel'd," meant; so far I was a professor. But rashly I asked one skimpy young man whether Hamlet was really mad or not. "There are three theories," he began. And I collapsed.

But at the end of it all the Egyptian schoolboy is parrot-like in his unintelligence, incorrigible in his inaccuracy, hopelessly fatuous in his dishonesty. He understands ordinary English, if you ask him questions, uncommonly well; but he will reel you off a page of text-book, understanding the meaning of each word, but without an idea of the connected sense of it. It is all one to him if he writes + or - it is only a difference of one stroke, and why should the pedant of a Westerner bother which he puts? He fudges freely in examinations, and fudges most clumsily. At a recent examination three boys all brought in little cribs, consisting of tips written on their blotting-paper. They were discovered, of course, and hauled before the head. The first said: "I missed a lesson, sir, in consequence of ill-health; and to fix

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it in my memory I wrote it down, and accidentally, sir, the paper came on to my desk to-day. It is true, O sir; by God it is true!" The master gently pointed out that one does not write ordinary notes on blotting-paper, nor can blotting-paper move on to a desk by itself. But the other two told exactly the same lie in exactly the same words. They knew that they would not be believed; they knew that they would be punished more lightly if they told the truth. But they only repeated, "It is true, O sir; by God it is true!"

Will they ever make a boy of him? If skill and trying can do it, they will; and if he can be made a boy he can be made a man. But it is work against the collar, and it will not be done to-day or to-morrow.

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X.

A DAY IN THE DESERT.

AN ARAB HOUSE "GOOD ALL RIGHT HEGIN"-
-A SEA OF SAND
-A GUIDE AT FAULT-LOST IN THE DESERT.

January 4.-The camels were kneeling down on the road outside the village. Half an

hour before I had awakened on the floor of the best room of the richest Arab in the place the house white and solid and stately from the outside, unplastered mud walls and unglazed window - holes inside native Egypt all over. I went to the door, and all but walked out-into nothing. Over the doorstep was a sheer drop of twenty feet into the yard, where cows, donkeys, dogs, and men pigged together in the dirt of content. The way down was to screw

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yourself round the left-hand doorpost on to a flight of stone steps: in front of the best room-"Some day," said Said, "we are going to make another room there" was only vacancy and a few loose, rotten beams, on which the skinny fowls live in mid-air. In front was some more of the villagefine plastered houses where it could be seen from the road, a maze of unbaked mud, dead walls, and blind, meaningless enclosures where it could not. But beyond that, again, was an embroidery of palmtrees against the flush of dawn.

By the time we got down to the camels, over the heaps of rubble, through the broken walls, across the field of springing clover, past the white figure on a carpet kneeling and bobbing towards Mecca, over the tilting planks that bridge the Canal where the women were dipping water-by that time everything was swathed in the grey morning mist. The camels were kneeling down, and we climbed on, side - saddle. Then a furious heave backwards, a hurl

forwards, a milder pitch backwards again, and the beast had unjointed its legs and was going.

They told me the action of a camel-and especially a running camel, a hegin - spelt sea-sickness; but really its walk is not very much rougher than a rough-actioned horse's, its trot is much the same, only a trifle more so, and its pace for travelling is an amble. These were running camels, for we were going forty-five miles into the desert to a Coptic monastery, and no baggage camel could do that in the eleven hours of daylight. These were the genuine dromedary -"good all right hegin," said Said. They wore a petulant, supercilious, half- vicious, half- petted expression, carrying their heads very high and very far forward, as if they disliked the smell of everything and everybody, but more especially of themselves. But Said said they were all right hegin, and I was happy.

As we swung out on the dusty road the great brown rugged Pyramids appeared