and on market-days
I have to shut up shop. Yesterday a very handsome woman came for
medicine to make her beautiful, as her husband had married another who
teazed her, and he rather neglected her. And a man offered me a camel
load of wheat if I would read something over him and his wife to make
them have children. I don't try to explain to them how very irrational
they are but use the more intelligible argument that all such practices
savour of the _Ebu er Rukkeh_ (equivalent to black art), and are _haram_
to the greatest extent; besides, I add, being 'all lies' into the
bargain. The applicants for child-making and charm-reading are Copts or
Muslims, quite in equal numbers, and appear alike indifferent as to what
'Book': but all but one have been women; the men are generally perfectly
rational about medicine and diet.

I find there is a good deal of discontent among the Copts with regard to
their priests and many of their old customs. Several young men have let
out to me at a great rate about the folly of their fasts, and the badness
and ignorance of their priests. I believe many turn Muslim from a real
conviction that it is a better religion than their own, and not as I at
first thought merely from interest; indeed, they seldom gain much by it,
and often suffer tremendous persecution from their families; even they do
not escape the rationalizing tendencies now abroad in Christendom. Then
their early and indissoluble marriages are felt to be a hardship: a boy
is married at eight years old, perhaps to his cousin aged seventeen (I
know one here in that case), and when he grows up he wishes it had been
let alone. A clever lad of seventeen propounded to me his
dissatisfaction, and seemed to lean to Islam. I gave him an Arabic New
Testament, and told him to read that first, and judge for himself whether
he could not still conform to the Church of his own people, and inwardly
believe and try to follow the Gospels. I told him it was what most
Christians had to do, as every man could not make a sect for himself,
while few could believe everything in any Church. I suppose I ought to
have offered him the Thirty-nine Articles, and thus have made a Muslim of
him out of hand. He pushed me a little hard about several matters, which
he says he does not find in 'the Book': but on the whole he is well
satisfied with my advice.

_Coptic Palm Sunday_, _April_ 1.

We hear that Fadil P