CAIRO TO KISUMU cotton seed is taken from the boats in the same way, seed to the amount of three hundred pounds often making one man's load.

Late in the afternoon I went down to the harbour to see the cotton steamers. They were taking on cargoes for Great Britain, Russia, France, Germany, and the United States. This staple forms three fourths of the exports of Egypt. Millions of pounds of it are annually shipped to the United States, notwithstanding the fact that we raise more than two thirds of all the cotton of the world. Be¬ cause of its long fibre, there is always a great demand for Egyptian cotton, which is worth more on the average than that of any other country.

For hundreds of years before the reign of that wily old tyrant, Mehemet Ali, whose rule ended with the middle of the nineteenth century, Egypt had gone along with the vast majority of her people poor, working for a wage of ten cents or so a day, and barely out of reach of starvation all the time. Mehemet Ali saw that what she needed to become truly prosperous and raise the standard of living was some crop in which she might be the leader. It was he who introduced long-staple cotton, a product worth three times as much as the common sort, and showed what it could do for his country. Since then King Cotton has been the money maker of the Nile valley, the great White Pharaoh whom the modern Egyptians worship. He has the majority of the Nile farmers in his employ and pays them royally. He has rolled up a wave of prosperity that has engulfed the Nile valley from the Mediterranean to the cataracts and the prospects are that he will continue to make the country richer from year to year. The yield is steadily increasing and with the improved irrigation i4