“I gave her a grateful look, Mr. Tramp, and she smiled in return; from that hour, sir, we understood each other. I pursued my Egyptian studies nearly the entire of that night, and the next day came on deck, with four chapters of Irby and Mangles off by heart. My head swam round with ideas of things Oriental,—patriarchs and pyramids, Turks, dragomans, catacombs, and crocodiles, danced an infernal quadrille in my excited brain, and I convulsed the whole cabin at breakfast, by replying to the captain’s offer of some tea, with a profound salaam, and an exclamation of ‘Bish millah, allah il allah.’
“‘You have infatuated me with your love of the East, Mr. Yellowley,’ said Lady Blanche, one morning, as she met me. ‘I have been thinking over poor Princess Shezarade and Noureddin, and the little tailor of Bagdad, and the wicked Cadi, and all the rest of them.’
“‘Have I,’ cried I, joyfully; ‘have I indeed!’
“‘I feel I must see the Pyramids,’ said she. ‘I cannot resist an impulse on which my thoughts are concentrated, and yours be all the blame of this wilful exploit.’
“’ Yes,’ said I.
“’ T is hard at some appointed place
To check your course and turn your prow,
And objects for themselves retrace
You past with added hope just now.’
“‘Yours,’ said she, smilingly.
“‘A poor thing,’ said I, ‘I did for one of the Keepsakes.’
“Ah, Mr. Tramp, it is very hard to distinguish one’s own little verse from the minor poets. All my life I have been under the delusion that I wrote ‘O’Connor’s Child,’ and the ‘Battle of the Baltic;’ and, now I think of it, those lines are Monckton Milnes’s.
“We reached Alexandria a few days after, and at once joined the great concourse of passengers bound for the East.