llers. No one enjoyed her efforts more
than her niece, Sadie, who shared with Mrs. Belmont the distinction of
being the most popular person upon the boat. She was very young--fresh
from Smith College--and she still possessed many both of the virtues and
of the faults of a child. She had the frankness, the trusting
confidence, the innocent straightforwardness, the high spirits, and also
the loquacity and the want of reverence. But even her faults caused
amusement, and if she had preserved many of the characteristics of a
clever child, she was none the less a tall and handsome woman, who
looked older than her years on account of that low curve of the hair
over the ears, and that fullness of bodice and skirt which Mr. Gibson
has either initiated or imitated. The whisk of those skirts, and the
frank, incisive voice and pleasant, catching laugh were familiar and
welcome sounds on board of the _Korosko_. Even the rigid Colonel
softened into geniality, and the Oxford-bred diplomatist forgot to be
unnatural with Miss Sadie Adams as a companion.

The other passengers may be dismissed more briefly. Some were
interesting, some neutral, and all amiable. Monsieur Fardet was a
good-natured but argumentative Frenchman, who held the most decided
views as to the deep machinations of Great Britain, and the illegality
of her position in Egypt. Mr. Belmont was an iron-grey, sturdy
Irishman, famous as an astonishingly good long-range rifle-shot, who had
carried off nearly every prize which Wimbledon or Bisley had to offer.
With him was his wife, a very charming and refined woman, full of the
pleasant playfulness of her country. Mrs. Shlesinger was a middle-aged
widow, quiet and soothing, with her thoughts all taken up by her
six-year-old child, as a mother's thoughts are likely to be in a boat
which has an open rail for a bulwark. The Reverend John Stuart was a
Nonconformist minister from Birmingham--either a Presbyterian or a
Congregationalist--a man of immense stoutness, slow and torpid in his
ways, but blessed with a considerable fund of homely humour, which made
him, I am told, a very favourite preacher, and an effective speaker from
advanced Radical platforms.

Finally, there was Mr. James Stephens, a Manchester solicitor (junior
partner of Hickson, Ward, and Stephens), who was travelling to shake off
the effects of an attack of influenza. Stephens was a man who, in the
course of thirty years, had worked himself up from