1 36 I GO A -FISHING. 



talked of coming home this summer." John had been 

 some years absent, and latterly had neglected his corre- 

 spondence, and so this remark had set me to thinking of 

 him when I was alone in the woods, and it was natural 

 enough to remember our Oriental friends. 



In what little travel I have been able to accomplish in 

 my life, I have made more warm friendships, and won 

 more close attachments among the Mohammedans than 

 any where else. Having passed among them but little 

 more time than scores of other travelers, it has neverthe- 

 less happened to me to form pleasant relations with men 

 in various classes, and I look now to Egypt and Syria as 

 countries in which I have warmer friends than perhaps in 

 any other part of the world out of America, 



I have not to thank myself for this. There was one, 

 who was always with me in visits to the East, whose stead- 

 fast kindness and loveliness won the devotion of the warm 

 Arab h2art, and whose memory is kept green on the Nile 

 banks and in the Holy City. 



And these sons of Ishmael and Esau, dark-faced men 

 with flashing eyes, gathered around me that night in the 

 outer edges of the fire-light. Sheik Houssein Ibn Egid 

 sat there, wrapped in his black cloth cloak, with the crim- 

 son and gold caftan shining under it. Grand old son of 

 Abraham, who serves always when I read my Bible as 

 the representative of the patriarch, for I have no doubt 

 that he was just such a man in appearance, and in walk 

 and manner of life. His keen eye does not any longer 

 look from the hills above Wady Mousa, scanning the des- 

 ert for signs of the enemy. The hand which was so 

 gentle, yet so firm on the rein of his sorrel mare, the hand 

 which — as I once heard him defiantly tell Mustapha Kap- 

 itan to tell Said Pasha — could by a toss in the air of a 



