28 THE SOUDAN. Arabian Nights carefully, not so much for the stories as for the excellent description of the everyday manners and customs which are now, at this moment, seen in all their entirety quite as much as in the days when that book was written. In any one of the crooked streets of the old town one sees the porter of Dinezarde, the three calendars of the story, all of them one-eyed, as if to carry out the exact resem blance ; in some one of the corners sits the man with his basket of crockery and glass, probably dreaming on the very same subject as his prototype; the small coffee-shops, the talkative barbers—everything, in deed, is still present. But seeing the actual reality takes away much of the pleasantness, however much it adds to the graphicness, for it would require all the glamour of the most distant romance to enable one to think that any of these muffled-up harridans could be the beauties described in that book, or that the dirty, stinking, shut-up houses could contain the halls of delight that were ever present to our youth ful fancies. Thus musing, we passed through the streets into the Grand Mosque at the citadel. The barracks all about here have had British troops in them since the occupation, and an amusing sight it is to see these soldiers, many of them bestriding the small and well-known donkeys of the country, and thoroughly enjoying their ride. The donkey-boys are famed for giving extraordinary names to their donkeys. They have Bismarck, Gladstone, Corn wallis West, Dickey Temple, and so on, and in some curious way they hit on characteristics of the person
