Rensselaer Union, Volume 9, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 May 1877 — Scenes in Cairo. [ARTICLE]

Scenes in Cairo.

The traveler who desires to see the Mohammedan at home cannot do better than to seek him in Cairo, and he finds in the narrow, picturesque streets of the old Kof the town scenes of interest which ay seek in vain elsewhere. When he emerges into the modern quarters the change is remarkable. Though all the tyranny of the Turks has not sufficed to alter the indelible characteristics of the place, and though the wide squares, the fountains, the gardens, the arcades, the watered roads, the rows of villas have a balf-French look, the people who crowd every thoroughfare are as unlike anything European as they can be. ’ - Here, a long string of groaning camels, led by a Bedouin in a white capote, carries loads of green clover or long fagots of sugar-cane. There, half-a-dozen bluegowned women squat idly in the middle of the roadway. A brown-skinned boy walks about with no clothing on his long, lean limbs, or A lady smothered in voluminous drapertea rides by on a donkey, her face covered with 6 transparent white veil, and her knees nearly as high as her chin. A bullock cart with small wheels, which creak horribly at every turn, goes past with its cargo of treacle-jars. Hundreds of donkey bt)y» lie hi wait for a fare, myriads of half-clothed children play lazily in the gutters, turbaned Arabs smoke long pipes and converts energetically at the corners, and evesy now and then a pair of running footmen, in white shirts and wide short trousers, shout to clear the way for a carriage in which, behind half-drawn blinds, some fine lady of the viceregal harem takes the air. She is accompanied perhaps by a little boy in European dress, and by a governess or nurse, whose bonnet and French costume contrast strangely with the veiled figure opposite. A still greater contrast is offered by the appearance of the women who stand by as the carriage passes, whose babies are carried astride on the shoulder, or sometimes in the basket so carefully balanced upon the head. The baskets hardlyditfer from those depicted on the walls of the ancient tombs, and probably the baby, entirely naked and its eyes full of black flies, is much like what its ancestors were in the days of the Phoroahs. In the older quarters of the town the scenes are much the same, only that there is not so much room for observing them; for the streets are seldom wider than Paternoster Row, and the traveler who stops to look about him is roughly jostled by Hindbad the porter, with his heavy bale of carpets, or the uncle of Aladdin, with his basket of copper lamps, or the water-carrier, clanking his brazen cups, with an immense skin slung round his stooping shoulders.—London. Saturday Review —He bad come over to see her father, and they had been sitting together for some time alone, and at length she tenderly asked him why be didn’t get married. And be replied, with some agitation, that he bad always feared that if he did some time he might stroll into a saw-mill and be pushed against the saw, and have one of Ills legs taken off, and have to wear a wooden one, and he thought it wouldn’t be fair to his wife. And then he added nervously that he was in a hurry, and thought he wouldn’t wait any longer.— No noth Bulletin. ~