So many thanks for the boxes and their contents. My slaves are enchanted
with all that the 'great master' has sent. Darfour hugged the horsecloth
in ecstasy that he should never again be cold at night. The waistcoats
of printed stuff, and the red flannel shirts are gone to be made up, so
my boys will be like Pashas this winter, as they told the Reis. He is
awfully perturbed about the evil eye. 'Thy boat, _Mashallah_, is such as
to cause envy from all beholders; and now when they see a son with thee,
_Bismillah_! _Mashallah_! like a flower, verily. I fear, I fear greatly
from the eye of the people.' We have bought a tambourine and a
tarabouka, and are on the look-out for a man who can sing well, so as to
have fantasia on board.
_October_ 22.--I hear to-day that the Pasha sent a telegram _hochst
eigenhandig_ to Koos, in consequence whereof one Stefanos, an old Copt of
high character, many years in Government employ, was put in chains and
hurried off within twenty minutes to Fazoghlou with two of his friends,
for no other crime than having turned Presbyterian. This is quite a new
idea in Egypt, and we all wonder why the Pasha is so anxious to 'brush
the coat' of the Copt Patriarch. We also hear that the people up in the
Saaed are running away by wholesale, utterly unable to pay the new taxes
and to do the work exacted. Even here the beating is fearful. My Reis
has had to send all his month's wages to save his aunt and his
sister-in-law, both widows, from the courbash. He did not think so much
of the blows, but of the 'shame'; 'those are women, lone women, from
whence can they get the money?'