THE POST OFFICE. 275 England. As a matter of fact, the mails were often, I may say generally, two or three days late, owing to the dearth of camels and other means of transport. On one occasion the Mudir of Dongola, being sent down stream to Cairo, boned all the mail camels for his own private baggage and refused to give them up for some time. The river too was about as low as it could be, and the steam-launch that usually brought on the letters from Abu Fatmeh took to running aground on sandbanks, so the delivery was hardly as regular as it might have been.

Parcels came up occasionally, but they were even more erratic than the letters and newspapers, and many were the angry visits paid to the Dongolese Post Office. This was a dark, dirty room in the town, presided over by an impertinent little Italian, who kept the papers and parcels in such apparently hopeless confusion that it was wonderful how we got any letters at all. I remember getting very much annoyed with him one day, about some parcel I knew had arrived, and which he wouldn't produce, and I finished by threatening to report him to the Station Commandant. Imagine my indignation when next T 2