82 THE DOWNFALL OF THE DERVISHES Soul, by Helen Mathers, and a penny edition of Quentin Durward. Iwas surprised on one occasion to find a Scotchman engaged in reading Horace’s Satzves in a new translation by Mr. Coutts. He knew nothing of the original Latin, but had purchased the volume, and was wading through the archaic material with apparent relish. Possibly the jokes of antiquity may have succeeded in striking that chord in a Scottish temperament which is so often unresponsive to contemporary humour! Whenever one got a periodical of any sort, such as Zhe Wide World, one did not toy with it in a dilettante fashion. Every line of it was ‘read from cover to cover, and even the advertisements of life assurance offices were perused with some degree of interest amid this comparative dearth of intellectual pabulum.

One evening, in an interval of leisure before dinner, I strolled along the Nile to see if I could add a little fresh fish to our mému. I had with me one of the excellent rods made for a few shillings by Slater of Newark-on-Trent, which pack up into very small compass, and can easily be carried in a hold -all or Gladstone bag. The river was much too