THE CREDIT SIDE OF THE ACCOUNT. 109 investigated by an official accountant in Basinghall Street, it would have been discovered that the actual amount, for whose receipt and expenditure he could have been called upon to account, was far less than the total of the debts which could be proved against his estate. Still, after making every deduction which can reasonably be entertained,/a very large sum of moneyX commonly estimated at not less than ;5o,ooo,ooo, ) / remained unaccounted for. The most probable ex-V / planation of this deficiency was that, as long as his / r/ money lasted, he spent it in acquiring fresh lands, I and in costly schemes for the development and im- \ provement of the lands thus obtained. / When Ismail ascended the throne in 1863, he only owned some 30,000 acres in Egypt. In 1877, Nubar Pasha, who knew more of the real state of affairs in Egypt than any man then living, declared to the present writer, that at the latter date the__Khedive, either in his own name or in that of his family, held ijOOO,ooq acres of the best land in the country. What price his Highness may have paid to the original owners of whose lands he obtained possession has never been ascertained, and is now never likely to be known. Still, it mayj>e stated with confidence that his land purchases,Itogether with the enormous sumsN he expended on the sugar factories he hoped to estab-f lish, on the machinery they required, on the railroads, ?

steamers, and barges, constructed for their service would go far to explain the extraordinary divergence between the sums whose receipt he could not dispute