186 LEAVES FROM THE 



and their banks with the enormous dental apparatus of 

 the lower jaw, a considerable quantity of the soil must be 

 taken up, and that some of it finds its way to the stomach 

 is evident from Sparrman's evidence. 



Two of his attendants, Jabar Abou Haijab and Moham- 

 med Abou Merwan — these, as far as I can make them 

 out, are their names — are snake-charmers, of whom and 

 of whose performance I shall have something to say here- 

 after. The former, an old man, was employed by the 

 French savans in Buonaparte's Egyptian expedition, and 

 collected reptiles for Geoffrey ; the latter Ai-ab, who ap- 

 years to be some fifteen years of age, and is the principal 

 performer with the serpents, is, I have heard, his nephew, 

 and is the playfellow of the hippopotamus. When I saw 

 him, on the occasion of my first view of his plajTnate, he 

 had a gold ear-ring and a gold finger-ring, and was clad 

 in fantastic costume, with a feather in his head-gear, and 

 in an old pair of Wellington boots, long since unacquainted 

 with blacking, and a world too wide for his bare shanks. 

 Of these he seemed more proud than of all the rest of 

 his apparel put together, but they so galled his naked 

 feet that they soon brought him to poultices, and he has 

 since taken to stockings and slippers. A complaint has, 

 I hear, been brought against him for teazing the mon- 

 keys, which he excites into a frantic state. Sheetan* — 

 the name in which he rejoices among his familiars — 

 pleaded guilty, and begged hard that one of the monkeys 

 might be assigned to him for education — the height of 

 his ambition at present being to teach his cheiroped 

 scholar to charm serpents. 



His games of romps with the hippopotamus are first- 

 rate. After a little provocation by eccentric antics, which 

 would have done credit to Flibbertigibbet himself, he 

 flies, and his obese four-footed frolicsome friend shufiles 



* Sataa. 



