STAY AT SAY 345 as pinching ourselves, bathing our feet, wrists, or head, and walking rapidly up and down. Sometimes, as one or another of us sat in Father Hacquart's folding-chair, looking out upon the moon-lit scene, there was something very charming about the silence and repose, and as we have already given several quotations of poetical effusions, I think I must add just one more on the night-watch, also composed by one of our party.

NIGHT-WATCH.

I loll and smoke, with mind a-blank ;— we sail Together, all ye stars of motion slow ! Moon ! a poor trophy you may hang me now Upon one horn — Moon ! like a fairy's nail Curved, tilted, thin and delicately pale ! You, old Orion, may not lift your brow To where on high the mystic symbols glow Of Cross and Angel's Car that next I hail"; Then Venus — Beauty bathed in lambent stream Of astral milk, outpour'd long ages past From time-worn breasts !— to these, in the first gleam Of morning freshness, from the dreary waste. Whilst as our bark adown the dim stream floats, With rower's boat-song blends the frog's last notes.

Thus the days went on monotonously, so monotonously that we were often quite feverish with ennui ! At the beginning, the building of the fort and settling down gave us a little variety, but of course that did not last.

Winter in the Sudan would really not be much worse than anywhere else if plenty of occupation and movement could be secured, with occasional change of air ; but it becomes simply deadly dull when one is limited to a small space, compelled to inhale the same miasmic exhalations, and absorb the same kind of microbes every day and every night.

Yet this was exactly our position. We were a small party in the midst of a hostile population. Even if we had