Thanks to the protecting hand of England, Cairo, which once was little better than Constantinople, is now as safe as London. On the Nile, it is hardly possible to leave one’s boat, save under the care of a dragoman. Even at Luxor and Assuân, the attentions of the native population are of a rather overpowering character. But at Cairo, whether amid the hurrying crowds in the bazaars or on the quiet road to the Gézirah, there is no annoyance of any kind to be apprehended. Nevertheless, a little army of guides is connected with every hotel, and troups of irregulars line the streets, and press their services upon you as you pass. I noticed that while a great many Americans had a dragoman permanently attached to their service, and never went out unaccompanied, the English and Germans resolutely ignored these expensive and irritating inutilities. If by chance they desired any attendant, they employed in preference one of the ruminating donkey-boys who stand all day, supple and serious, alongside of their melancholy little beasts. Upon one occasion, an Englishwoman was just stepping into her carriage, having engaged a boy to accompany her to the mosque of the Sultan Hassan, when a tall and turbaned Turk, indignant at this invasion of his privileges, called out to her scornfully, “Do you think that lad will be able to explain to you anything you are going to see?” The Englishwoman turned her smiling face. I fancied she would be angry at the impertinence, but she was not. She had that absolute command of herself and of the situation which is the birthright of her race. “It is precisely because I know he can explain nothing that I take him with me,” she said. “If I could be equally sure of your silence, I should be willing to take you.”
Local guides are as numerous and as systematic in Cairo as in more accessible cities, and they have the same curious tendency to multiply themselves around any object of interest, and to subdivide the scanty labor attendant on its exhibition. When we went to the Coptic church, for example, a heavy wooden door was opened for us by youth number one, who pointed out the enormous size of the venerable key he carried, and then consigned us to the care of youth number two, who led the way through a narrow, picturesque lane to the church itself, and gave us into the charge of youth number three, a handsome, bare-legged boy with brilliant eyes, who lit a taper and kindly conducted us around. When we had examined the dim old pictures, and the faded missals, and the beautiful screens of inlaid wood, and the grotto wherein the Holy Family is piously believed to have found shelter, this acute child presented us to a white-haired Coptic priest, and explained that it was to him we were to offer our fee. I promptly did as I was bidden, and the boy, after carefully examining and approving the amount,—the priest himself never glanced at it nor at us,—requested further payment for his own share of work. I gave him three piastres, being much pleased with his businesslike methods, whereupon he handed us back to youth number two, who had been waiting all this time at the church door, and whom I was obliged to pay for leading us through the lane. Then, after satisfying youth number one, who mounted guard at the gate, we were permitted to regain our carriage and drive away amid a clamorous crowd of beggars. It was as admirable a piece of organized work as I have ever seen, and would have done credit to a labor union in America.
On precisely the same principle, we often find the railed-off chapels of an Italian church to be each under the care of a separate sacristan, who jingles his keys alluringly, and does his best to beguile us into his own especial inclosure. I have suffered a good deal in Sicily and in Naples from sacristans who could not be brought to understand that I had come to church to pray. The mark of the tourist is like the brand of Cain, recognizable to all men. Even one’s nationality is seldom a matter of doubt, and an Italian sacristan who cherishes the opinion that English-speaking people stand self-convicted of heresy, can see no reason for my entering the sacred edifice save to be shown its treasures with all speed. So he beckons to me from dark corners, and waves his keys at me; and, finding me unresponsive to these appeals, he sidles through the little kneeling throng to tell me in a loud whisper that Domenichino’s picture is over the third altar on the left, or that forty-five princes of the house of Aragon are buried in the sacristy. By this time devout worshipers are beginning to look at me askance, as if it were my fault that I am disturbing them. So I get up and follow my persecutor, and stare at the forty-five wooden sarcophagi of the Aragonese princes, draped with velvet palls, and ranged on shelves like dry goods. Then, mass being over, I slip out of St. Domenica’s, and make my way to the cathedral of St. Januarius, where another sacristan instantly lays hands on me, and carries me down to the crypt to see the reliquary of the saint. He is a stout, smiling man, with an unbounded enthusiasm for all he has to show. Even the naked, fat, Cupid-like angels who riot here as wantonly as in every other Neapolitan church fill him with admiration and delight. He taps them on their plump little stomachs, and exclaims, “Tout en marbre! Tout en marbre!” looking at me meanwhile with wide-open eyes, as if marble angels were as much of a rarity in Italy as in Greenland. By the time his transports have moderated sufficiently to allow me to depart, a tall, grim sacristan, with nothing to show, is locking up the cathedral, and I am obliged to go away with all my prayers unsaid.
It is possible to be too discursive when a pet grievance has an airing. Therefore, instead of lingering, as I should like to do, over a still unexhausted subject; instead of telling about a dreadful one-eyed man who pursued me like a constable into the cathedral of Catania, and fairly arrested me at St. Agatha’s shrine, whither I had fled for protection; instead of describing an unscrupulous fraud at Amalfi who led me for half a mile in the dripping rain through a soaked little valley, under pretense of showing me a macaroni factory, and then naïvely confessed we had gone in the opposite direction because the walk was so charming,—instead of denouncing the accumulated crimes of the whole sinful fraternity, I will render tardy justice to one Roman guide whose incontestable merits deserve a grateful acknowledgment. He was a bulky and very dirty man in the Castle of St. Angelo, to whose care fourteen tourists, English, French, and Germans, were officially committed. He spoke no language but his own, and he set himself resolutely to work to make every visitor understand all he had to tell by the help of that admirable pantomimic art in which Italians have such extraordinary facility. It was impossible to misapprehend him. If he wished to show us the papal bed-chamber, he retired into one corner and snored loudly on an imaginary couch. When we came to the dining-room, he made a feint of eating a hearty meal. With amazing agility he illustrated the manner of Benvenuto Cellini’s escape, and the breaking of his ankles in the fall. He decapitated himself without a sword as Beatrice Cenci, and racked himself without a rack as another unhappy prisoner. He lowered himself as a drawbridge, and even tried to explode himself as a cannon, in his efforts to make us better acquainted with the artillery. He was absolutely serious all this time, yet never seemed flustered nor annoyed by the peals of irresistible laughter which greeted some of his most difficult representations. He had but one object in view,—to be understood. If we were amused, that did not matter; and if we were a little rude, that was merely the manner of foreigners. I do not wish to close a chapter of fault-finding without one word of praise for this clever and conscientious actor, whose performance was limited to the ignoble task of conducting travelers through a dilapidated fortress, but whom I cannot consent to look upon as a guide.
LITTLE PHARISEES IN FICTION.
In that accurate and interesting study of Puritanism which Alice Morse Earle has rather laboriously entitled “Customs and Fashions in Old New England,” there is a delightful chapter devoted to the little boys and girls who lived their chastened lives under the uncompromising discipline of the church. With many prayers, with scanty play, with frequent exhortations, and a depressing consciousness of their own sinful natures, these children walked sedately in the bleak atmosphere of continual correction. By way of pastime, they were taken to church, to baptisms, and to funerals, and for reading they had the “Early Piety Series,” “Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes,” “The Conversion and Exemplary Lives of Several Young Children,” and a “Particular Account of Some Extraordinary Pious Motions and Devout Exercises observed of late in Many Children in Siberia,”—a safe and remote spot in which to locate something too “extraordinary” for belief. To this list Cotton Mather added “Good Lessons for Children in Verse,” by no means a sprightly volume, and “Some Examples of Children in whom the Fear of God was remarkably Budding before they died; in several parts of New England.”
Small wonder that under this depressing burden of books, little boys and girls, too young to know the meaning of sin, were assailed with grievous doubts concerning their salvation. Small wonder that Betty Sewall, an innocent child of nine, “burst into an amazing cry” after reading a page or two of Cotton Mather, and said “she was afraid she should goe to Hell, her sins were not pardon’d.” It is heart-rending to read Judge Sewall’s entry in his diary: “Betty can hardly read her chapter for weeping. Tells me she is afraid she is gone back” (at nine). “Does not taste that sweetness in reading the Word which once she did. Fears that what was upon her is worn off. I said what I could to her, and in the evening pray’d with her alone.” It is scant comfort for us, recalling the misery of this poor wounded child, and of many others who suffered with her, to know that Phebe Bartlett was ostentatiously converted at four; that Jane Turell “asked many astonishing questions about divine mysteries,” before she was five; and that an infant son of Cotton Mather’s “made a most edifying end in praise and prayer,” at the age of two years and seven months. We cannot forget the less happy children who, instead of developing into baby prodigies or baby prigs, fretted out their helpless hearts in nightly fears of Hell.
Nor is there in the whole of this painful precocity one redeeming touch of human childhood, such as that joyous setting forth of the little St. Theresa and her brother to convert the inhabitants of Morocco, and be martyred for their faith; an enterprise as natural to keenly imaginative children of the sixteenth century as was the expedition two hundred years later of the six little Blue Coat boys, who, without map, chart, or compass, without luggage, provisions, or money, started out one bright spring morning to find Philip Quarll’s Island. Sunlight and shadow are not farther apart than the wholesome love of adventure which religion as well as history and fairy-lore can inspire in the childish heart, and that morbid conscientiousness which impels the young to the bitter task of self-analysis. The most depressing thing about pious fiction for little people is that it so seldom takes human nature into account. I read not long ago an English Sunday-school story in which a serious aunt severely reproves her twelve-year-old niece for saying she would like to go to India and have a Bible class of native children, by telling her it is vain and foolish to talk in that way, and that what she can do is to be a better child herself, and save up her money for the mission-box. Now the dream of going to a far-off land and doing good in a lavish, semi-miraculous fashion is as natural for a pious and imaginative little girl, as is the dream of fighting savages for a less pious but equally imaginative little boy. It is well, no doubt, that all generous impulses should have some practical outlet; but the aunt’s dreary counsel was too suggestive of those ethical verses, familiar to my own infancy, which began:—
“‘A penny I have,’ little Mary said,
As she thoughtfully raised her hand to her head,”