uliar sphere, into those mysterious recesses of an Oriental
establishment, whither no male footstep can ever penetrate. Mrs Poole is
probably the first English lady who has been admitted, not merely as a
passing visitor, but as a privileged friend, into the hareems of those of
the highest rank in the Egyptian capital. We find her threading the narrow
and crowded thoroughfares of Cairo, borne aloft on the "high ass,"[15]
(the usual mode of conveyance for morning calls;) and are introduced to
the wives and daughters of the viceroy, and even (in the hareem of Habeeb
Effendi) to ladies of the imperial house of Othman, in the ease and
_disinvoltura_ of their domestic circles, amid that atmosphere of _dolce
far niente_ and graceful etiquette, in which the hours of an Oriental
princess appear to be habitually passed. With the exception of Lady Mary
Wortley Montague's piquant sketches of the Turkish hareems and their
inmates, and the singular narrative of her personal experience of life in
an Indian zenana, by _Mrs Meer Hassan Ali_,[16] we know no female writer
who has enjoyed such opportunities for the delineation of the scenes of
domestic privacy of the East, and who has so well availed herself of them,
as the sister of _Mansoor Effendi_, in the pages before us.

The narrative opens with the landing of the authoress and her companions
at Alexandria in July 1842; but that city, with its double harbour, its
quays crowded with a motley assemblage of every nation and language in
Europe and the Levant, and the monuments of antiquity in its environs, has
been too often described to present too much opportunity for novelty of
remark. Passing over, therefore, the details given of these well-known
objects, we find the party, after a rapid passage along the Mahmoodiyeh
canal in an iron track-boat, drawn by four horses, and a vexatious delay
of two days at the junction of the canal and the river, (during which the
want of musquitto-curtains gave them an ample foretaste of the quantity
and quality of the insect plagues of Egypt,) fairly embarked on the broad
stream of the Nile. The voyage to Cairo was performed in a _kanjeh_, or
passage-boat of the kind usual on the river--a long, narrow craft, with
two masts, bearing large triangular sails; and Mrs Poole, in common with
most travellers arriving for the first time in the East, was greatly
impressed by the simple devotion with which the Reyyis (or Arab captain)
and his crew commended themse