316 WITH KITCHENER IN THE SOUDAN room. Your father saw an advertisement for a man to go out to the branch of a London firm at Alexandria. Without saying a word to me he went and obtained it, thanks to his knowledge of Arabic. He was getting on well in the firm when the bombardment of Alexandria took place. The offices and stores of his employers were burned, and as it would take many months before they could be rebuilt the employees were ordered home, but any who chose to stay were permitted to do so, and received three months' pay. Your father saw that there would be many chances when the country settled down, and so took a post under a contractor of meat for the army.

We moved to Cairo. Shortly after our arrival there he was, as he thought, fortunate in obtaining the appointment of an interpreter with Hicks Pasha. I did not try to dissuade him.

Everyone supposed that the Egyptian troops would easily defeat the Dervishes. There was some danger, of course ; but it seemed to me, as it did to him, that this opening would lead to better things, and that when the rebellion was put down he would be able to obtain some good civil appointment in the Soudan.

It was not the thought of his pay as interpreter that weighed in the slightest with either of us. 1 was anxious above all things that he should be restored to a position where he could associate with gentlemen as one of themselves, and could again take his real name.

Gregory started as he read this. He had never had an idea that the name he bore was not rightly his own, and even the statement of his grandfather’s name had not struck him as affecting himself.

Your father had an honourable pride in his name, which was an old one, and when he took the post at Alexandria, iDhich was little above that of an ordinary office messenger, he did not care that he should be recognized or that one of his name should be known to be occupying such a station. He did not change his name, he simply dropped the surname. His