PREFACE TO THE CANADIAN EDITION xi 



This kind and faithful servant remained with me for 

 many years after my return from the North, environed by 

 something of an heroic halo in the eyes of the ladies of 

 his acquaintance, and of the public whom he frequented. 

 He subsequently accompanied me on an eighteen months' 

 cruise to the Mediterranean, as well as on my visit to 

 Syria as British Commissioner, but neither the sunshine 

 of the South nor the glitter of the parti-coloured East, 

 mercurialized the melancholy of his temperament. In 

 the congenial atmosphere of the graveyards of Egypt he 

 displayed indeed a transient sprightliness, which the occa- 

 sional exhumation of a mummy, and such traffic with the 

 dead and their appurtenances as my excavations at Thebes 

 afforded him, stimulated into spasms of hilarity. 



Of the Pyramids he was disposed to think but lightly, 

 until informed that they had served for sepulchres ; but 

 on quitting the heights of Gizeh I observed that he had 

 selected two skulls as the appropriate memorials of his 

 visit. With his brows bound in the folds of a yellow tur- 

 ban, a striped Arab mantle enveloping his person, and 

 seated on a donkey, these fleshless countenances grinning 

 from under either arm, — his own, the least jovial of the 

 three, — he presented, I confess, something of a weird and 

 ghoul-like appearance as, wending round the ransacked 

 tombs of the Pharaohs, we passed to our boats through the 

 purple haze of evening. 



He continued to the end to solemnize his announcements 

 with phrases of dolorous import. One day at Thebes I 

 was lying in my berth prostrate with a feverish attack, my 



