to Europe to be educated as civil engineers, as
machinists, as printers, as naval officers, and as physicians; his idea
was that, upon their return, they could instruct others. When the first
class came back, he filled his public schools by the simple method of
force. The translators of the French text-books which had been selected
for the use of the schools were taken from the ranks of the returned
students. A text-book was given to each, and all were kept closely
imprisoned in the Citadel a period of four months, until they had
completed their task. Mehemet had a dream of an Arabian kingdom in Egypt
which should in time rival the European nations without joining them. It
is this dream which makes him interesting. He was the first modern. A
Turk by birth, and remaining a Turk as regards his private life, he had
great ideas. Undoubtedly he possessed genius of a high order.

As to his private life, one comes across a trace of it at Choubra. This
was Mehemet's summer residence, and the place remains much as it was
during his lifetime. The road to Choubra, which was until recently the
favorite drive of the Cairenes, is now deserted. The palace stands on
the banks of the Nile, three miles from town, and its gardens, which
cover nine acres, are beautiful even in their present neglected
condition; in the spring the fragrance from the mass of blossoms is
intoxicatingly sweet. But the wonder of Choubra is a richly decorated
garden-house, containing, in a marble basin, a lake which is large
enough for skiffs. Here Mehemet often spent his evenings. Upon these
occasions the whole place was brilliantly lighted, and the hareem
disported itself in little boats on the fairy-like pool, and in
strolling up and down the marble colonnades, unveiled (as Mehemet was
the only man present), and in their richest attire. The marbles have
grown dim, the fountains are choked, the colonnades are dusty, and the
lake has a melancholy air. But even in its decay Choubra presents to the
man of fancy--a few such men still exist--a picture of Oriental scenes
which he has all his life imagined, perhaps, but whose actual traces he
no more expected to see with his own eyes in 1890 than to behold the
silken sails of Cleopatra furled among Cook's steamers on the Nile.
Mehemet's last years were spent at Choubra, and here he died, in 1849,
at the age of eighty-one. As he had forced from Turkey a firman
assigning the throne to his own family, he was succeeded by