beside them. I have learned a great deal that is curious from Omar's
confidences, who tells me his family affairs and talks about the women of
his family, which he would not to a man. He refused to speak to his
brother, a very grand dragoman, who was with the Prince of Wales, and who
came up to us in the hotel at Cairo and addressed Omar, who turned his
back on him. I asked the reason, and Omar told me how his brother had a
wife, 'An old wife, been with him long time, very good wife.' She had
had three children--all dead. All at once the dragoman, who is much
older than Omar, declared he would divorce her and marry a young woman.
Omar said, 'No, don't do that; keep her in your house as head of your
home, and take one of your two black slave girls as your Hareem.' But
the other insisted, and married a young Turkish wife; whereupon Omar took
his poor old sister-in-law to live with him and his own young wife, and
cut his grand brother dead. See how characteristic!--the urging his
brother to take the young slave girl 'as his Hareem,' like a respectable
man--that would have been all right; but what he did was 'not good.' I'll
trouble you (as Mrs. Grote used to say) to settle these questions to
everyone's satisfaction. I own Omar seemed to me to take a view against
which I had nothing to say. His account of his other brother, a
confectioner's household with two wives, was very curious. He and they,
with his wife and sister-in-law, all live together, and one of the
brother's wives has six children--three sleep with their own mother and
three with their _other_ mother--and all is quite harmonious.

SIOUT,
_December_ 10.

I could not send a letter from Minieh, where we stopped, and I visited a
sugar manufactory and a gentlemanly Turk, who superintended the district,
the Moudir. I heard a boy singing a _Zikr_ (the ninety-nine attributes