boat and they sit about the
sunny decks watching the panorama of the banks and the wonderful
changing scenes ahead, hour by hour. Hardly anywhere would you find a
greater variety of nationalities than on one of these Nile boats, for
Egypt draws people from all parts of the world with her mystery and
beauty. The odd people one meets add to the interest, and the strange
manners, which are not ours, are like flavouring in the dish of travel,
which, if it were composed only of scenes of perpetual beauty, might be
a little insipid.

To begin with, I am English and you are Scottish, we have our friend the
American and four of his compatriots, not by any means so delightful as
he is. He takes care to steer clear of them, we notice! One of them is a
little man who might be any age from twenty to fifty; if we examine him
with field-glasses we shouldn't be able to discover how old he is. His
yellow skin, drawn tightly over a bony face, gives no sign of age or
youth. He eats sweets all day out of a box as large as a child's coffin,
and he is attended by three stout ladies, doubtless "his mother and his
aunts." They are veiled and swathed in wraps, and seem to spend their
time gossiping or asleep in the innermost recesses of the cabin. We
never once catch them admiring the scenery or taking any interest in the
wonders we pass. Then there is a Swiss, a gentle-mannered bronzed man
with a brown beard; he speaks only French, and in an unobtrusive way
seems to have seen a great deal of the world; we discover, for one
thing, that he has lived out in the desert near Tunis for many years.
There are three Russians, mother, father, and daughter, who speak
practically nothing but Russian, with a few words of French; they are
brave to have started out on such a journey so ill-equipped. Coming
across a Russian dragoman in Cairo they trusted him joyfully; he bought
three temple tickets for them at their expense and promised to meet them
somewhere up the Nile. They seem to expect to find him sitting on every
sandbank, and their faith is pathetic; they'll never see those tickets
again, for the man will sell them to the next party of victims. Then
there is a Belgian, also a couple of lively pleasant French people, and
two Germans, a sister and brother, who dress in clothes intended to be
very sporting.

It is an interesting crowd, and it is well kept in hand by the manager,
who looks like a fair-haired, brown-faced boy of two-and-twenty, but has