our Indian Overland Transport Service, and most thoroughly realises that idea. Everything seems to be labelled "transport"-houses, men, camels,-all there simply for an occasion, en route for somewhere else. The inhospitable shore produces nothing of itself—its very well is bitter. Everything there is "by transport." Your beef-steak has, in all probability, been fed on the green pastures of Goshen, and has had the benefit of being half-cooked in its hot "transport across the desert; while your potatoes smile at you with an unmistakable Irish grin. We were assured that the very water we drank was "by transport " from Bombay. And yet on this barren point you may have almost any luxury, from champagne to ginger-beer. There never was such an "omnium-gatherum" as Suez. It is a city of contrasts. Here you see a smart man-of-war's boat hooked on to a craft that might have been built in any period of naval architecture, from Noah's ark down to the Trojan war. In another place, a half-dressed lean Arab bends under the weight of a chest of specie. Dark Turkish khans rise beside European hotels. Piles of mailboxes, addressed to far-off colonies, lie half-silted over with desert sands; and bright English signboards alternate with texts from the Koran. No one can rest in Suez. Should you sleep there for a night, it is with the consciousness that the town, as well as yourself, may have every intention of "being off" next morning-carried bodily away by the huge, oily-looking camels that crowd. the "grand square." Yet Suez looks familiar to every Englishman, associated as it is with so many friends who have passed through it to the great empire of the East.

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So much so, indeed, that, at the first, one is almost disposed to claim with it a Scotch cousinship, and to feel that, because you know so many who know Suez, that therefore Suez ought to know you.

Suez stands on the point of a long, gravelly ridge. On one side it commands a view down the Red Sea, which, at full tide, rises close up to its walls while an arm of the same sea, like a broad river, sweeps round it on the other, and stretches up northwards, as far as the eye can reach. Sending off our camels to cross this channel at a ford a mile or two higher up, we took a boat for the purpose of going by sea, and joining our baggage at the wells of Moses, that are a few miles down the eastern coast. It was a glorious day. The sea was blue as the sky above us, and so purely transparent, that we were able to watch, far down in its depths, the changing varieties of formation at the bottom, according as we sailed over coral beds, or golden sands gemmed with shells, or waving forests of tangled weeds. Our boat was an Arab coble with a huge lateen sail, which sent her dancing in the fresh breeze over the crisp waves, that dashed up from her bows in sparkling showers of diamond hail between us and the sun, and then fell past us again in drops of liquid sapphire. Even Suez seemed picturesque that day, as we floated away from its old, grey sea-towers. The view was not grand, nor rich, but wonderfully brilliant. There were only two colours, blue and gold-only the coasts of golden, desert hills, stretching far down on either hand, sunk in the blue setting of sea and sky. Yet their strange brilliancy was such as to make up in our eyes for the want of

wood and stream, and the green, familiar uplands of our home scenery. An hour and a half brought us to the Asiatic shore under the Ayen Mousa, or Wells of Moses. These wells are about two miles up from the sea, and form quite a little oasis in the midst of the desert around them. They are seven in number, rising in a cluster of little mounds; and, though their water is bitter and unpalatable as far as man is concerned, yet they served to make our first " green spot in the wilderness." Beside the well were a few rods of sandy soil; and there was no more melancholy token of the waste in which we were, than to see how valuable these few rods of soil were to the exiles of Suez, as witnessed to in their vain attempts to create something which might remind them of home and greenness. The few yards of cultivable ground were divided out into little garden-plots. And here you could see where some Italian official had tried to erect for himself "a villa ;" there, where some sensible fellow -a Scotchman, in all likelihood-was rearing cabbage for his "kail;" and there, the rose, which formed the care and delight of some sentimental clerk in the Indian Overland Transport Service. Anything, in short, which could suggest the idea of cultivation seemed precious. And, indeed, in our eyes, too, after our short residence in the desert, the shaggy palm-bushes, the feathery tamarisks and quivering acacias, the little spots of green barley, the Scotchman's cabbage bed, and, above all, the rose, bursting forth in full-bosomed buds, seemed unspeakably lovely. But this Ayen Mousa has for us a sacred interest. Its very name, like so many in the desert, recalls our thoughts to that history which has