A Sportsman at Large 237 



We all ran to the spot which he indicated. 



There, calm and serene, in the arms of death, lay no 

 jackal forsooth but a mangy " pie-dog," which pre- 

 sumably had wandered from an adjacent village, no doubt 

 attracted by the (to him) appetizing odour of the " kill." 



John Leech, of Punch fame, delighted to lampoon the early 

 volunteers. I believe that one of his sketches gave rise to 

 the vulgar query addressed by street gamins of the day to 

 the valiant amateur warriors : " Who shot the dog ? " 



For years after our Fayoum adventure, should anyone 

 make a similar inquiry of the doughty Ted, he, if it were 

 a man or boy, was in deadly peril of receiving " a thick ear " ; 

 if of the gentler sex, of experiencing the chilling influence of 

 " the lemon eye " ! 



No ! camping at Fayoum was not good enough for your 

 Uncle Cockie or his satellites; so tents were struck, and we 

 drifted back to Cairo, wiser if sadder for our latest experience. 



Hassanein's stock experienced a slump ! 



I must not quit my rambling reminiscences of Egypt without 

 referring once more to Hassanein, alias Farag. (By the way, 

 it seems that there really was a Farag, for, on informing our 

 dragoman that my belief in the existence of his " brudder " 

 had been hopelessly shattered, he one day produced a 

 resplendent individual, and introduced him as such. Even 

 so, I had my suspicions that the said individual had been 

 induced to impersonate a nebulous entity by being slipped a 

 sufficiency of shekels.) Strange coincidences are wont at 

 times to materialize. As I was jotting down these vagrant 

 vapourings, a letter was handed me. On opening it I dis- 

 covered that it was from Hassanein himself, written more 

 than a quarter of a century after we had finally parted at 

 Alexandria. In it, after reminding me of " Auld lang syne," 

 and calling down the blessings of Allah on my head and on 

 those of my offspring, he ventured to remind me of the gold 

 watch and double-barrelled, hammerless, up-to-date breech- 

 loader which I had (not) promised him ! 



This modest missive drove my thoughts back to an occa- 

 sion during my first visit to Egypt, when, on Hassanein's 

 pressing invitation, I had paid him a visit in his native mud 



