vided into classes as they are in
England, the first and second class cars being modelled on the same lines
as the English. The third-class cars, however, are mere boxes provided
with seats, and with iron bars instead of windows. Nice airy vehicles
these, where the conditions of climate render airiness desirable, but it
must be extremely interesting to ride in one of them through an Egyptian
sand-storm.

At the Alexandria station, an old wrinkle-faced native, bronzed and
leathery almost as an Egyptian mummy, pulls a bell-rope three times, the
conductor comes to the car-window for the second time and examines your
ticket, the engine gives a cracked shriek and pulls out. As the train
glides through the suburbs one's attention is arrested by well-kept
carriage-drives, lined and overarched with feathery palm-tree groves, and
other evidences of municipal thrift.

From the suburbs we plunge at once into a rich and populous agricultural
country, the famed Nile Delta, of which a passing descriptive glimpse
will not here be considered out of place. Cotton seems to be the most
important crop as seen from the windows of my car, and for many a mile
after leaving Alexandria we glide through luxuriant fields of that
important Egyptian staple.

Interspersed among the darker green of the growing cotton are fields of
young rice, sometimes showing bright and green in contrast to the darker
shade of the cotton, and sometimes being represented by square areas of
glistening water, beneath which the young rice is submerged.

The Nile Delta is a net-work of irrigating ditches from end to end. Large
canals, big enough to float barges, and on which considerable commerce is
carried, tap the Nile above the Delta, and traversing it in all
directions, furnish water to systems of smaller ditches and canals, and
these again to still smaller channels of distribution.

The water in these channels is all below the surface, and a goodly
proportion of the whole teeming population of the delta is engaged
between seed-time and harvest in pumping the life-giving water from these
ditches into the small surface trenches that conduct it over their fields
and gardens. The water-pumping fellahs, ranged along the net-work of
canals, often at intervals of not more than one hundred yards, create an
impression of marvellous industry pervading the whole scene, as the train
speeds its way alongside the larger canals.

The pumping in most cases is done by men or b