provided. Supper being over, the Rev. C. H. Burton thanked the choirs that had assisted his own in the services; and paid a special compliment to Mr. Charles Sherlock, for the admirable manner in which he had taken the solo in the morning anthem. He also thanked the ladies and gentlemen present for the willing manner in which they had given their services in decorating the church. We understand the decorations of the church will remain as they are until Sunday." We visited this church on the Sunday, and were delighted with the beautiful devices. (To be continued.) THE ARABIAN KNIGHTS. ENGRAVED BY E. HACKER, FROM A PAINTING BY THE LATE ABRAHAM COOPER, R.A. son. It is tolerably clear that these two Chiefs are going to have a bit of a deal over the grey, and thus would they set about the business, with a richness of phrase that we specially recommend to the attention of Mr. Rice and Mr. Quartermaine: "Say not it is my horse; say it is my He outstrips the flash in the pan, or a glance of the eye. He is pure as gold. His eyesight is so good that he can distinguish a hair in the night time. In the day of battle he delights in the whistling of the balls. He overtakes the gazelle. He says to the eagle,' come down, or I will ascend to thee.' When he hears the voices of the maidens, he neighs for joy. When he gallops he plucks out the tear from the eye. When he appears before the maidens he begs with his hand. It is a steed for the dark days, when the smoke of powder obscures the sun. It is a thorough-bred, the very head of horses! No one has ever possessed his equal. I depend on him as on my own heart. He has no brother in the world: it is a swallow. He listens to his flanks, and is ever watching the heels of his rider. He understands as well as any son of Adam; speech alone is wanting to him. His pace is so easy, that on his back you might carry a cup of coffee without upsetting it. A nosebag satisfies him, a sack covers him. He is so light that he could dance on the bosom of thy mistress without bruising it." And when they do deal, this eloquent gentleman goes on to say, "Take thy horse, and Allah grant thou mayst be succesful on his back as many times as he has hairs upon it;" while he adds, in the presence of witnesses, "The separation between us is from this very moThou dost not know me, and I have never seen thee;" which reduced from poetry to prose simply implies that he does'nt mean to give auy warranty. ment. The Emir Abd-el-Kader is here our authority. LITERATURE. UNDER EGYPTIAN PALMS; OR THREE BATCHELORS' JOURNEYINGS ON THE NILE. BY HOWARD HOPLEY. London: Chapman and Hall, 193, Piccadilly. 1869. The writer of this little volume, who had been to Egypt before, arranged on the present occasion to meet a couple of old friends at Cairo, the intention of the trio being to hire a boat and leisurely proceed about eight hundred miles up the river to the Cataracts of the Nile. On a dreary December morning, with a blinding sleet dashing into his face, he sped along the sloppy quays of Liverpool, the world drenched and dripping, seeming to be utterly given over to mist. However, "fifteen days after, he sailed into the blue crystal soundings of the Alexandrian sea, on as bright and genial a summer day as ever strayed northward to gladden the summers of dear old England— brighter, in point of fact; for the sun never pours down such a volume of light on our northern shores." He revelled in it, he says, as a bather in the sea, the first thing striking a traveller in Egypt being the splendour from above, which steeps every scene in a flood of light and colour. Between Alexandria and Cairo a hundred-and-twenty miles of railway affords a welcome and comparatively quick transit of ten miles an hour through the Delta, and a graphically-sketched account of the departure-platform, with its confusion, and varieties of people and costume, conveys an admirable idea of a busy gathering and turmoil, which no European would easily forget. Birds swarm in Egypt, and it has been termed the Paradise of Sportsmen, but the author inveighs against those who wantonly take advantage of such profusion to kill for killing sake, and he tells us that their party more than once encountered an English nobleman who trespassed grossly in this way. It appears that he had brought from England a little mahogany boat, fitted with a swivel gun, "wherewith he waged flagitious warfare with whole communities of unsuspecting geese and spoonbills-birds whose peaceful manner is to assemble by myriads on the shoals and sand-banks left high and dry in mid-stream. He went about it in this wise: hidden in the hollow of his boat, which looked like a waif on the waters, he would quietly float down until the current had borne him within murderous range, and then let fly a pound or two of duck-shot slap into the midst of the astonished assembly. The effect was prodigious; not so much in the matter of killed and wounded-though he is said to have bagged a hundred at one blowas in the noise and whirr of the discomfited legions taking flight in a general sauve qui peut to some happier island far from intrusive noblemen and swivel guns." In a couple of months the slaughter of 5,576 head was thus achieved that total being made up by 9 pelicans, 1,514 geese, 328 wild ducks, 47 widgeon, 5 teal, 66 pintails, 47 flamingoes, 38 curlews, 112 herons, 2 quails, 9 partridges, 3,283 pigeons, and 117 miscellaneous, comprising storks and other birds of beauty. Regret was expressed that his lordship did not stop at the geese, upon which some one facetiously observed, that a "fellow-feeling" might have prompted him to spare them. Mr. Hopley remarks upon the tender-heartedness of the natives to brutes. "Our cook in killing meat," he says, "went through certain ceremonies. I am not sure he did not beg the pardon of each sheep, or turkey, or fowl before cutting its throat. I know that he turned its head toward Mecca, and I think he prayed the prophet to be merciful to it, ere the fatal knife went in." Strolling through a doura field the author came upon a young Copt, "a lithe well shapen lad with a lustrous eye and clean skin, and clad in a scant petticoat girt round his loins," the youth's whole appearance reminding him of the pictures of David. The sling was of woven palm fibre, the ammunition a bag of smooth stones of the stream, suspended to his girdle, and one of these being put into the loop he whirled it round his head, and let fly at a bird, the distance being some forty yards off, ten slingings killing two sparrows, these being in thousands, and so destructive to the grain that boys and girls are stationed with slings on elevated sort of platforms to slay the depredators or frighten them away. The natives of the Island of Biggeh are an amphibious race, being as much accustomed to the water as dry ground; we hear the very babies swim, it being the first lesson they are taught, and a father, in conversation with the author upon the subject, caught up two or three little creatures in his arms and flung them one after the other into the stream, in explanation of the method of tuition, and the urchins wriggled themselves home quite naturally, like little tadpoles." The women cross from island to island, disrobing themselves of their one light-blue garment, which wrapped in a bundle is balanced on their head, and then, riding on a log of wood, they take their way into the stream, this, or perhaps a faggot of doura-straw generally being used out of mere laziness. He describes children sighting them from the opposite side and plunging into the narrow straight: "The first was a boy, who, reaching the bank, cried out for Backsheesh,' a group of girls following in his wake cleaving the tide dexterously, and flashing through the ripples with a graceful rivalry of who should be first on shore. They crept up, all modesty, through the blossoming lupin and yellow corn, disentangling their way through trailing brambles that festooned a trellis of greenery from tree to tree to where we sat under the palms' quivering shade, and who," he continues, "could refuse them backsheesh?'these little swarthy mermaids, that stood dripping and panting, eyes and teeth all aglow with hopes of gain." And then there was a scrambling in the dust for the coin cast towards them, each who got one stowing it away in her mouth and calling for more, a certain amount of timidity nevertheless keeping them at a respectful distance from the donors. Some of these children were of great beauty, and girls approaching maturity were seen, "perfect in form and feature, and no Greek faces could have been more refined or more delicately chiselled," while "nothing" we are assured "could be more modest than the bearing of these maidens of Biggeh. They seemed as unconscious of their beauty as of their scantiness of dress." Upon another occasion, having dismounted at a little Nubian village, "as hot as a furnace, and swarming with children," they were rowed |