be a striped flannel
night-shirt, with a tiny skull-cap on his head, is driving them. He
pulls his single garment up to his waist as he dances and pirouettes as
if the joy of living were almost too much for him. He is enveloped in a
cloud of dust raised by the goats, but he snatches handfuls of the dust
from the ground and flings it in the air around as if he could never get
enough of it!

"The Lady of Shalott," in Tennyson's poem, who watched in her mirror all
who went down to Camelot, cannot ever have seen anything half so
interesting as this.

Presently we meet a long string of fine-looking camels, one of them pure
white; they are fastened by a connecting rope and so covered with loads
of bristling twigs that each looks like a walking bush, out of which the
great padded feet are planted with deliberate steps and the haughty
heads swaying at the ends of the long necks stick out. It is the scrub
of the cotton bush that they are carrying; you will see fields of it
presently, some of it bursting into fluffy pods, for cotton growing is
one of the most extensive and profitable of Egyptian industries. The
twigs and branches are used as fuel by the people, who have a happy
knack of letting nothing be wasted.

"I never!" exclaims the American. "If that isn't like them!" We are
overtaking a second string of camels, precisely similar to the first,
and similarly laden, stepping gingerly and protestingly in the opposite
direction from the first, having just passed them. "Why couldn't they
arrange things better?" demands the American. "If one lot is going this
way and the other that, an exchange would have saved time and labour."

In America labour is costly and all sorts of inventions for saving time
have been invented; in this eastern land time is of no value at all, and
a man working all day in the fields is content to earn a shilling.
Perhaps the contrast with their own country is the reason of the
fascination Egypt has for Americans!

What are those strange-looking beasts mincing along like gigantic
peacocks? As we draw nearer we see that they are camels too, each
bearing a load of sword-bladed leaves, which hang down over their
hindquarters exactly like the folded fan-tail of a peacock. Upon my
word I never noticed it before, but a camel walks just like a peacock,
with the same hesitating "Don't-care-a-hang-for-you" stride. The bundles
so arranged hide the animals' hind legs and bring out the resemblance.

But what is