The liveliest audience was at the Café Chantant, where there were a little ballet dancing of a free and easy character, and one of the most dismal comic singers that ever earned a living by public performances. The only comical thing I saw during the comic man's infliction was the blank astonishment of an English sailor who found he had to pay four shillings for a bottle of Bass's beer, and who uttered an exclamation so touching and so loud that the soi-disant disciple of Momus, beholding perchance a dangerous rival, looked stage daggers at him. There was a short ballet d'action very well done by three small boys and two fat young women, and the glasses on the tables were set ringing again by the boisterous applause of a party of officers from a French corvette lying in the lake.

A bal masque was going on somewhere, for we saw a procession of devils, monks, crusaders, and mummers frisk by just as a silent file of dromedaries laden with wood stalked in from the outlying desert. The two oddly-contrasted parties passed each other in the narrow thoroughfare, the dromedaries snorting viciously at the outrageous figures, of which we may be sure they had never dreamt in their philosophy.

"And doth not a meeting like this make amends?" soliloquized my companion. It did make amends, and we proceeded straightway to our boat.

After Lake Timsah the canal becomes a trifle more interesting. Tamarisks and less graceful shrubs are trying to grow around the ponds and lagoons flanking the southern corner, and there is quite a copse of the species of wild broom under which the prophet Elijah is said to have taken his repose in ages gone by. In the matter of shelter the prophet might certainly have done worse; and lo, as if to make the remembrance of the seer complete as we pass, a

few ravens, representatives of the Heaven-sent messengers who at another period of his life preserved him from starvation, rise noisily from a hillock and make in haste for the shores of the lake.

Bold scarified highlands appear rising steep out of the billows of eternal sand, and we are delighted with a placid lake fringed with nodding palms and other poetical trees. Alas! though the mountainous piles of sterility are real, the rest is nothing but mirage. Coarse grass, as we proceed, begins to grow by the deep, green water, and sometimes you may actually see straggling sheep and exiled goats browsing upon it. A dozen or so of white-robed Arabs and a string of camels move across the plain in single file, two of the men in advance carrying matchlocks that must have been taken out of some collection of singularly antique armour. Huts are more frequent; at one station a few women and children, all huddled together on the sand, cover their faces till we are out of sight.

The Bitter Lakes are forty leagues in circumference, allowing you the luxury of proceeding at full speed for a few miles. The water, as the name implies, is frightfully salt, almost as salt as that of the Mormon lake, which, I believe, yields one pail of salt to three pails of water. The canal water, also, is so impregnated that it leaves a white line of salt where it trickles, and, as every engineer who loves his boilers knows to his cost, encrusts everything it touches. Both the Bitter Lakes and Lake Timsah were mere sand basins until the canal was opened ; they gave the excavators a good deal of trouble, and to this day require continual dredging. From the Bitter Lakes to Suez Bay the sand is as sandy as before ; but tall cliffs and a ridge of rugged tableland that, as the hours wear on, receive a succession of umbers, browns, and greys from the sun, and in the evening display dark purple

tints of inconceivable beauty, add variety to the horizon line, until the Ottaka range becomes clearer and nearer, and the white houses of Suez, glittering in the sun, warn us that the desert lies behind us.

In leaving the canal I come back to my previous conclusions-first, that there will not be many travellers eager to deny that a little of the canal is enough; and, second that the widening of the channel is the chief question for the consideration of the shareholders. Probably it will be urged that the game is not worth the candle; for to make any improvement scheme final or effective the present width of 72 feet of deep water must be at least doubled, and that would be indeed a costly and troublesome, though not perhaps in these days of scientific triumph, and with no lack of labourers at hand, difficult business.

The proverb mentions a certain unmentionable person as not so bad as he is painted. I will mention the Red Seaspeaking of seas as I found them-in that conjunction. That it was the cool season in those regions I knew, but I had been led to expect a gradual frying even in January. The temperature, in fact, was extremely enjoyable, as it had been in the main from the time of our entrance into the Mediterranean; it was not till we were much nearer the equator than the outlet to the Red Sea that we began to know what heat really meant.

The scenery on either side of the Gulf of Suez is very wild, and at times romantically sterile. One side was as bad (or as good) as the other. It may be, as I have somewhere read, that the Peninsula of Sinai is geographically, geologically, and archæologically one of the most interesting places in the world, but it is not a whit the more attractive to the general traveller for those intrinsic merits. If the Arabian side was not more fertile in the early days of the world than

it is now the Israelites did not gain much by their flight from the flesh-pots of Pharaoh.

The lofty hills skirting the tableland of the interior may be, and some of them are, grand in their outline, but it cannot be forgotten that they stand direction posts to the Wilderness of the Wanderings. The sides of the hills and rocks appear to have been calcined by a terrible convulsion, and in places to have been seared as with a hot iron. The occasional glimpses of Arabia and Nubia as you pass down the Red Sea are of the same hard, burnt, treeless character, and the only attractiveness lies in the fantastic forms of the granite peaks and spurs. These, looked at with the most interesting historical associations as motive power, are of course not to be neglected, but the observer who had recently been reading highly-coloured accounts of what the Prince of Wales was to wonder at in his passage through the Red Sea would not obtain the superb views he had been led to expect.

THIRD ENTRY.

FLYING FISH AND THEIR ENEMIES.

HE flying fish seems to prefer wind, and is particularly merry when the sea is agitated by a six-knot

breeze. Perhaps it would be more correct to say that the larger fish which prey upon it are very much on the alert on such occasions, even as the pike of the fresh waters at home make more frequent demand upon the fisherman's energies in rough than in calm weather. The fact remains, on the evidence of my own observations renewed every day for a fortnight, and on that of the seafaring people on board, who must be excellent authorities on the subject, that the flying fish appear in greater number and friskiness on moderately rough days.

The

The movements of the flying fish are as graceful as a swallow's, and the creature is a much more shapely object than I had been led to expect from pictures, written descriptions, or the few preserved specimens I had seen. stuffed affair at the British Museum, like all the other representations of the fish world there, is, of course, an outrage on Nature. The wings, large in comparison with the body,