at the divan, they beheld a Frank
in an European dress seated beside Hafiz Bey, and a consular cavas
standing near the door. Inquiries were soon made for Mr Lascelles
Hamilton, and when the Frank on the sofa heard that he was nowhere to be
found, he jumped up and made twenty inquiries one after the other in
English, as strongly marked with a foreign accent as that of Mr Lascelles
Hamilton, but by no means equal to it in choice of words or correctness of
grammatical construction. The worthy stranger then informed the travellers
that he was an agent of the British Consulate at Alexandria, sent to
arrest Mr Lascelles Hamilton for a variety of offences committed under a
variety of names.

The hue and cry was now raised, but no Mr Lascelles Hamilton was to be
found, and it almost appeared difficult to produce any evidence that such
a person had ever existed. Dozens of persons who had seen him that
morning, and every morning he had spent at Gaza, became alarmed lest they
should be in some way compromised by a connexion with him, and stoutly
denied that such a person had accompanied Sidney to Gaza. Sidney himself,
amused with the events of the day, boasted to Campbell that he would
achieve fame as a literary man by writing a novel in three volumes based
on the adventures of a single day at Gaza. In the mean time, Ringlady
became frantic on discovering, in the search for Lascelles Hamilton, that
he had lost not only his pearl of dragomans, the accomplished Mohammed,
but likewise the whole of his baggage, which the accomplished Mohammed had
doubtless carried off by mistake. To increase the grief of the party at
losing these two valuable companions, it appeared that the best part of
the baggage of Sidney and Campbell had also disappeared, but whether with
the Frank or the Mussulman, it was impossible to say. The night was spent
in vain endeavours to ascertain the direction in which the fugitives had
fled. Hafiz Bey sent out horsemen on every road, who probably did not go
very far from the fear of falling in with the Bedoweens. Achmet, however,
who now began to recover from his attack of illness, declared, that all
search would be useless, for he felt sure that his brother dragoman--the
father of a jackass, as he politely termed him--had attempted to poison
him in order to escape to the Arabs with the Frank Sheitan.

Day after day elapsed, and no tidings were heard either of the fugitives
or the baggage. The deputy consul from Ale