" TARTAR." 7

special privilege belonging to the place ; a lecture was deliv-

ered to him on the sin of drunkenness, which I believe he

regarded as a sort of permission to get drunk ; for he got very

drunk, but not before he had sent us up a most excellent din-

ner, and, as far as I know, he never afterwards offended in

this respect ; Mahoom, a coal-black negro from the White

Nile, a boy of sixteen, speaking both English and Arabic. Mahoom was originally captured by some slave-traders on the

White Nile, in a raid that they made against a village ; he was

freed by Col. Gordon, the late governor-general of the Soudan,

and given to Dr. Felkin at Khartoum. Dr. Felkin was the

medical man in charge of the Church Missionary Society's

expedition to Uganda, and took Mahoom with him to that place. He had returned with the doctor to England, where he had

spent some months ; hearing that we were going to the Soudan,

Dr. Felkin was glad that we should take the boy with us, in

order that he might escape the cold of an English winter.

Of these four servants, the only one who did not speak Eng-

lish easily was Shereef. On asking him, at Cairo, if he spoke

English, he replied in the negative, but added that he spoke

"too much French." His powers, however, in that respect, we

found were very limited ; but, as most of us spoke a little Ara-

bic, "too much French" was not required. We brought with us from England two dogs, — a setter

and a fox-terrier, "Tartar." The former, when he was put in

the dog-box of the train at Cairo, to go to Suez, was in perfect

health and spirits ; but when we came to take him out at Zag-

azig, a station about half way between the two places, where we had to change trains, he was dead. They had been poisoning

a great many dogs at Cairo ; and he must have been poisoned,

probably on the morning we left. "Tartar" stood the climate

very well : he would run with the camels all day, and sometimes,