neither man nor woman can resist when a meal or a bed is in question,
the eye of a horse-cope, the skill of a cook, the constitution of a bullock,
the digestion of an ostrich, and an infinite adaptability to all
circumstances. But many die before they attain to this degree, and the
past-masters in the craft appear for the most part in dress-clothes when
they are in England, and thus their glory is hidden from the multitude.

Dick followed Torpenhow wherever the latter's fancy chose to lead him,
and between the two they managed to accomplish some work that almost
satisfied themselves. It was not an easy life in any way, and under its
influence the two were drawn ver closely together, for they ate from the
same dish, they shared the same water-bottle, and, most binding tie of all,
their mails went off together. It was Dick who managed to make
gloriously drunk a telegraph-clerk in a palm hut far beyond the Second
Cataract, and, while the man lay in bliss on the floor, possessed himself of
some laboriously acquired exclusive information, forwarded by a
confiding correspondent of an opposition syndicate, made a careful
duplicate of the matter, and brought the result to Torpenhow, who said
that all was fair in love or war correspondence, and built an excellent
descriptive article from his rival's riotous waste of words. It was
Torpenhow who--but the tale of their adventures, together and apart,
from Philae to the waste wilderness of Herawi and Muella, would fill
many books. They had been penned into a square side by side, in deadly
fear of being shot by over-excited soldiers; they had fought with
baggage-camels in the chill dawn; they had jogged along in silence under
blinding sun on indefatigable little Egyptian horses; and they had
floundered on the shallows of the Nile when the whale-boat in which they
had found a berth chose to hit a hidden rock and rip out half her
bottom-planks.