IN THE BAZAARS OF CAIRO the big hotels is apt to think that the city is rapidly becom¬ ing a Christian one. As he drives over asphalt streets lined with the fine buildings of the European quarter, it seems altogether English and French. If he is acquainted with many foreigners he finds them living in beautiful villas, or in apartment houses like those of our own cities. He does his shopping in modern stores and comes to the con¬ clusion that the Arab element is passing away.

This is not so. Cairo is a city of the Egyptians. Not one tenth of its inhabitants are Christians and it is the hundreds of thousands of natives who make up the life blood of this metropolis. They are people of a different world from ours, as we can see if we go down for a stroll through their quarters. They do business in different ways and trade much as they have been trading for genera¬ tions. Their stores are crowded along narrow streets that wind this way and that until one may lose himself in them. Nearly every store is a factory, and most of the goods offered are made in the shop where they are sold.

Although the foreigner and his innovations are in evidence, native Cairo is much the same now in characters, customs, and dress as it was in the days of Haroun A1 Raschid. Here the visionary Alnaschar squats in his narrow, cell-like store, with his basket of glass before him. He holds the tube of a long water pipe in his mouth and is musing on the profits he will make from peddling his glass, growing richer and richer, until his sovereign will be glad to offer him his daughter in marriage and he will spurn her as she kneels before him. We almost expect to see the glass turned over as it is in the story, and his castles in the air shattered with his kick. Next to him is a turbaned Mohammedan who reminds us of Sinbad the 5i