Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: The Howadji landa at Alexandria, and is immediately invested by long lines of men in bright turbans and baggy breeches. If you have a slight poetic tendency, it is usually too much for you. You succumb to the rainbow sash and red slippers. " Which is Alee ?" cry you, in enthusiasm ; and lo ! all are Alee. No, but with Dhemetri might there not be rich Eastern material and a brighter Eothen ? Yes, but all are Dhemetri. " Mahmoud, Mah- moud!" and the world of baggy breeches responds, " Yes, sir." If you are heroic, you dismiss the confusing crowd, and then the individuals steal separately and secretly to your room and claim an audience. They have volumes of their own praise. Travelling Cockaigne has striven to express its satisfaction in the most graceful and epigrammatic manner. The " characters" in all the books have a sonnet-like air, each filling its page, and going to the same tune. There is no scepticism, and no dragoman has a fault. Records of such intelligence, such heroism, such perseverance, honesty and good cooking, exist in no other literature. It is Eothen and the other poets in a more portable form. Some Howadji can not resist the sonnets and the slippers, and take the fatal plunge even at Alexandria. Wines and the ecstatic Irish doctor did sounder our eyes, and returned six weeks later to Cairo, from the upper Nile, with just vigor enough remaining to get rid of their man. For the Turkish costume and the fine testimonials are only the illuminated initials of the chapter. Very darkly monotonous is the reading that follows. The Dragoman is of four species : the Maltese, or the able knave,—the Greek, or the cunning knave, —the Syrian, or the active knave,—and the Egyptian, or the stupid knave. They wear, generally, the Eastern costume. But the Maltese and the Gre...