THROUGH OLD EGYPT TO CAIRO Mediterranean Sea. The total area, including the Nubian Desert, the region between the Nile and the Red Sea, and the Sinai Peninsula, is more than seven times as large as the State of New York, but the real Egypt, that is, the cultivated and settled portion comprising the Nile valley and delta, lacks just four square miles of being as large as our State of Maryland. Of this portion, fully one third is taken up in swamps, lakes, and the surface of the Nile, as well as in canals, roads, and plantations of dates, so that the Egypt of farms that actually supports the people is only about as big as Massachusetts. Though this con¬ tains little more than eight thousand square miles, never¬ theless its population is nearly one eighth of ours. Crowd every man, woman, and child who lives in the United States into four states the size of Maryland, and you have some idea of the density of the population here. Belgium, that hive of industry, with its mines of iron and coal and its myriad factories, has only about six hundred people per square mile; and China, the leviathan of Asia, has less than two hundred and fifty. Little Egypt is support¬ ing something like one thousand per square mile of its arable area; and nearly all of them are crowded down near the Mediterranean.

Of these people, about nine tenths are Mohammedans, one twelfth Christians, Copts, and others; and less than one half of one per cent. Jews. Among the Christians are many Greeks of the Orthodox Church and Italian Roman Catholics from the countries on the Mediterranean Sea.

Nature has much to do with forming the character and physique of the men who live close to her, and in Egypt the unvarying soil, desert, sky, and river, make the people 25