CAIRO TO KISUMU owns twenty-five hundred acres which a few years ago were covered with swamps, quagmires, and hillocks. He bought this cheap and then began to improve it. He cut down the hills, drained the swamps, and put water on the land. At present that estate is paying over sixty thou¬ sand dollars a year, bringing His Highness thirty per cent, and upward on his investment.

He has another great farm not far from Alexandria which was all desert not long ago. The Khedive has irrigated it and thus turned four thousand waste acres into cultivated fields. Farm villages have grown up about them and His Highness has so laid out the estate with trees and flowers that it is said to be like an earthly para¬ dise. In one place he has a plantation of fifteen thou¬ sand mulberry bushes, the leaves of which furnish food for his silkworms. This estate is at Montzah, a few miles out of Alexandria, on a beautiful bay of the Mediterranean Sea. Abbas Hilmi has built a palace there, or rather two palaces, a little one for himself and a larger one for his family. In other parts of the estate he is carrying on all sorts of breeding experiments. He has chicken houses and rabbit hutches as well as a tower containing thousands of pigeons.

The Khedive is interested in fine stock and is doing much to improve that of Egypt. On his various farms he has high-bred horses, cattle, and sheep. He has a large number of Arabian thoroughbred horses, and some Jersey, Swiss, and other fine breeds of cows. His water buffaloes, known here as gamoushes, are far better than any others of the Nile valley. He is also breeding cattle for oxen and mules for draft animals. He has a school on his estate near Cairo where two hundred boys are being educated to take 68