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of the men, about anything that happened to suggest itself. I remember I had a long discourse about the difference between the camel and the dromedary. Buffon gives the camel two humps, and the dromedary one; and this, I believe, is the received opinion, as it had always been mine; but, since I had been in the East, I had remarked that it was exceedingly rare to meet a camel with two humps. I had seen together at one time, on the starting of the caravan of pilgrims to Mecca, perhaps twenty thousand camels and dromedaries, and had not seen among them more than half a dozen with two humps. Not satisfied with any explanation from European residents or travellers, I had inquired among the Bedouins; and Toualeb, my old guide, brought up among camels, had given such a strange account that I never paid any regard to it. Now, however, the sheik told me the same thing, namely, that they were of different races, the dromedary being to the camel as the bloodhorse is to the cart-horse; and that the two humps were peculiar neither to the dromedary nor the camel, or natural to either; but that both are always born with only one hump, which, being a mere mass of flesh, and very tender, almost as soon as the young camel is born a piece is sometimes cut out of the middle for the convenience of better arranging the saddle; and, being cut out of the centre, a hump is left on either side of the cavity; and this, according to the account given by Toualeb, is the only way in which two humps ever appear on the back of a camel or dromedary. I should not mention this story if I had heard it only once; but, precisely as I had it from Toualeb, it was confirmed with a great deal of circumstantial detail by another Bedouin, who, like himself, had lived among camels and dromedaries all his life; and his statement was assented to by all his companions. I do not give this out as a discovery made at this late day in regard to an animal so well known as the camel; indeed, I am told that the Arabs are not ig

norant of that elegance of civilized life called "quizzing;” I give it merely to show how I whiled away my time in the desert, and for what it is worth.

Towards midday the sheik dashed across the plain, with his long lance poised in his hand, and his scarlet dress streaming in the wind; and about an hour afterward we came to his spear stuck in the sand, and a little Bedouin boy sitting by it to invite us to his father's tent. We turned aside, and, coming to the tent, found the sheik sitting on the ground refreshing himself with long draughts of goat's milk. He passed the skin to us; but, as master of the ceremonies, he declined the regular Arab invitation to stay and eat a lamb. He could not, however, neglect the goods the gods provided, and told our host that we would take a lamb with us for our evening meal. The lamb was caught, and, with his legs tied, was thrown into a sack, where he made music for us for the rest of the day. To the Bedouin, next to the pleasure of eating a lamb is that of knowing he has one to eat; and so the bleating of the doomed innocent was merely a whetter of appetite. After we had gone some distance from the tent, we set down the lamb on the ground, and I never saw a creature so perfectly the emblem of helplessness. At first he ran back a little way from us; then stopped; and apparently feeling the loneliness of his condition, returned and followed us, and in a few moments was under the feet of the camels, a part of our caravan unwittingly moving to the slaughter. The tent was hardly pitched before he lay bleeding on the ground; and the fire was no sooner kindled than his entrails, liver, &c., were in the burning brush; and in a few moments the Arabs were greedily devouring the meal into which he had been so speedily converted. The whole scene which I have before described was repeated; and, as before, in the morning the skin was the only part of the lamb to be seen.

One thing in the sheik was particularly disagreeable.

He was constantly talking with Paul about the sacrifice he made in accompanying me; his confident expectation that I would pay him well for it, and the generosity of Mr. Linant; always winding up with asking what bucksheesh I intended to give him. Paul told me all that passed, and it was evident that the sheik and his men were making extravagant calculations. I had estimated with Mr. Gliddon the probable expenses to Jerusalem, founded on the rate of hire for camels which the sheik had named at Cairo; and as it was not beyond the range of possibilities that I should be stripped on the way, I had brought with me barely enough to cover my probable expenses; and, consequently, I saw that my means were very likely to fall short of the sheik's expectations. I did not want any disappointment at the last, and that night I called him to my tent, resolved upon coming to an understanding. I told him that, knowing it was a dangerous road, and that I was subject to the risk of being robbed, I had brought with me a specific sum of money, all of which I intended for him, and that all he scattered along the road would be so much taken from his own pocket in the end. He was evidently startled, and expressed his surprise that a howaga, or gentleman, should have any bottom to his pocket, but promised to economize in future.

The next day the general features of the scene were the same, eternal barrenness and desolation; and, moving to the right, at one o'clock we were at the foot of the mountains of Seir; and towering above all the rest, surmounted by a circular dome, like the tombs of the sheiks in Egypt, was the bare and rugged summit of Mount Hor, the burial-place of Aaron, visible in every direction at a great distance from below, and on both sides the great range of mountains, and forming one of the marks by which the Bedouin regulates his wanderings in the desert. Soon after we turned in among the mountains, occasionally passing small spots of verdure, strangely contrasting with the surrounding and

general desolation. Towards evening, in a small mountain on our left, we saw an excavation in the rock, which the sheik said had been a fortress; and, as of every other work of which the history is unknown, its construction was ascribed to the early Christians. It was a beautiful afternoon; gazelles were playing in the valleys, and partridges running wild up the sides of the mountains, and we pitched our tent partly over a carpet of grass, with the door open to the lofty tomb of the great high-priest of Israel.

In the evening the sheik came to my tent for money, having been very pertinacious on that tender subject all day with Paul, asking him how much he thought I had with me, and how much I intended to give him. He began by asking me for pay for the camels, at the price agreed upon in Cairo. If he had asked me before starting from Akaba, I should probably have paid him; but, after what I had seen, and what had passed between him and Paul, I did not like his asking for it now. He told me, too, that we were now at the door of Petra, and that it would be necessary to pay a bucksheesh or tribute on entering, but he could not tell how much would be required, as that would depend altogether on circumstances. There was always a guard stationed at the entrance of the defile leading to Petra, and the amount to be paid would depend upon the number we might happen to find when we entered. These were never less than thirty or forty; and if there should not be more, the tribute exacted would not be more than thirty or forty dollars, but there might be two or three hundred; and, at all events, I had better give him my purse, and he would return me what was left. I suspected that, as he could not find out from Paul either how much I had with me or what I intended to give him, this story of the tribute was merely a pretext to levy an immediate contribution. The precise danger I had to fear was, that he would get my money from me piecemeal, and, when we came among Bed

DELICATE NEGOTIATIONS.

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ouins where it would be necessary to buy my peace, go off and leave me to their mercy. I did not want to have any rupture with him, particularly at the moment when I was at the very door of Petra, and might lose all that I had been endeavouring with so much personal difficulty to accomplish; and therefore told him, as to the bucksheesh for entering Petra, that I expected; and, when we should arrive there and learn how much it was, would be ready to pay it; but, in the mean time, for any little casual expense that might be incurred, I would give him a purse of five hundred piasters, or twenty-five dollars. Touching the hire of camels, I said that I did not expect to pay it until we should arrive at Hebron; and, hurling back upon him one of his own flourishes, told him that it was distrusting my honour to ask it now. I reminded him of our conversation at Cairo, remarking that I had come into the desert upon the faith of his promise; and he replied very impertinently, if not menacingly, that one word here was worth a hundred at Cairo. I was somewhat roused at this, and, determined not to be dragooned into compliance, forgot for a moment my prudential plan, and told him that I would not be driven into that or anything else; and that, sooner than submit to his demand, I would turn back here, at the very door of Petra, and return to Cairo. This had its effect, for he was no more disposed to proceed to extremities than myself; and when I found him giving way a little, I threw in a powerful argument, which I had several times before hinted at, namely, that there were two parties on the Nile who were exceedingly anxious to make the same journey, and who would be governed altogether by the report I should make. I saw that his avarice and hope of future gain were rapidly getting the better of his eagerness to touch his money before it was earned; and, without inflicting upon the reader a full account of our long negotiation, made up principally of blustering and exaggera