traffic. As had been previously arranged, we went to Cairo by special 

 train and spent several days more there than had originally been 

 intended. 



Of my profoundly interesting glimpse of Egypt, I need say nothing 

 more than that it made me register a vow to come back for a real visit, as 

 soon as might be. As the authorities could fix no date for the opening of 

 the Canal, some ten of our party, who had imperative engagements at 

 home, sailed from Alexandria to Brindisi on the Austrian Lloyd 

 steamer. From Brindisi, two Canadian friends. Professors McCallum 

 and Coleman, of Toronto, and I went to Naples by the slow train. 

 Passing Pompeii at eleven p.m. I was surprised to find Vesuvius in a 

 state of moderate activity. At perfectly regular intervals of twenty sec- 

 onds or so, an explosion took place within the crater, throwing up a 

 shower of stones, which were red-hot by night, but showed black by 

 day. In addition, there were two lava streams, glowing hot at night, 

 creeping down the outside of the cone. The volcano was getting up 

 steam for the tremendous eruption of April 1906, one of the most 

 violent in its history. 



The next day we devoted to a geological pilgrimage to Pozzuoli, first 

 to the so-called Serapeum, the Roman structure, of which the monolithic, 

 marble columns have registered the up and down movements of that 

 coast for the last two thousand years. That same night we sailed for 

 Boston in a White Star boat and had an entirely uneventful voyage. 



It required a little time for me to catch up with the news, for com- 

 paratively few letters had reached me on my continuous journeying and 

 we seldom had a chance to see a newspaper and, when we did happen 

 on them, they told us almost nothing of what was going on in 

 America. Even from England, the cablegrams were mostly cricket 

 scores. The Russians and Japanese were negotiating for peace during 

 that summer at Portsmouth, N.H., and, when the treaty was signed, we 

 were informed of it by a brief note in the South African papers, and that 

 was practically all the American news that reached us. 



L276] 



