IN THE BAZAARS OF CAIRO attar of roses. He offers a bottle to the lady while he talks of its merits in the most flowery terms. Here is a barefooted girl, who, strange to say, has no veil over her face, but whose comely features might be considered by a jealous lover to warrant such protection. Her chin is tattooed and the nails of her fingers and toes are stained deep orange with henna. She has a great tray on her head and is calling out her wares in the strangest language: “ Buy my oranges! They are sweet as honey, and I know that God will make my basket light.”

This is in Arabic, and one hears the same extravagant sort of talk all about him. Here two Turks meet and salute each other. They almost fight in their struggle each to humble himself first by kissing the hand of the other. After they have done so a third passes and they all say: “Naharak sayed”—"May thy day be happy and blessed.” There are no more polite people on earth than these Mo¬ hammedans, whose everyday talk is poetry.

I can always amuse myself for days in watching the trading in the bazaars. I saw an Egyptian woman buying some meat to-day. The butcher’s whole stock consisted of a couple of sheep, one of which hung from a nail on the wall. The woman drew her finger nail along the piece she wished to take home, and the butcher sawed it off with a clasp knife. He weighed it on a pair of rude scales, and the woman objected, saying that he had given her too much. He then took one end of the strip of meat in his hand, and putting the other end in his mouth, severed it by drawing the knife quickly across it. He handed the piece he had held in his mouth to the woman, who took it and paid for it, evidently seeing nothing out of the way in his methods.

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