l88 I GO A-FISHING. 



stories of his own life, hears stories of his friends' lives, 

 and if alone calls up the magic of memory. 



I can see myself now as that night, the fire blazing 

 twenty feet high, the great trunks glowing and flashing, 

 myself lying in the heap of logs which were waiting to be 

 burned, comfortable, having lapsed by degrees into this 

 and that hollow, until I was as perfectly supported as if 

 lying on a Damascus diwan, and I can see Hassanein too, 

 as he stood, black but comely, under a great birch-tree in 

 the edge of the fire-light. 



I was drifting one night down the moonlit Nile, my 

 boatmen having just finished a rough-and-tumble fight 

 with the Arabs of Saboa, a Nubian village. It was a 

 night of exceeding beauty and glory. On the cabin deck 

 there was a sofa, cushioned softly ; and on that I lay at 

 night, rolled up if it were cold, but generally with only my 

 Syrian cloak around me, looking up at the stars of Egypt. 

 That night, late as it was, I could not sleep, and so I sat 

 myself down to think of the ancient splendor of the Val- 

 ley of Lions, and gradually falling back in my seat, I was 

 at length lying down under the blue sky, and the voices 

 of the angry villagers died away far up the stream. For 

 a half-hour the men pulled steadily at the oars, and then, 

 laying them in, stowed themselves in all manner of curi- 

 ous heaps about the forward deck, and sank into that 

 deep sleep that characterizes the Arabs, while the boat 

 swept on with the current, her head now up, now down 

 the stream, now east, now west, and only the dark form 

 of Hassanein, the Nubian pilot, was visible above the 

 deck. He stood firm at his post, holding the tiller ; and 

 I could see his quick black eye flashing like a star as he 

 watched the shore and the river. 



Hassanein was a native of a small village a few miles 



