room and ransacked her work-basket and presses for linen for bandages. When she stole down-stairs again, and listened at the door, there was a sound of voices in the yard.

From the noise he made, it was evi

side told her that the piper was near. | cupboard and made certain that there A shyness came upon her like a shiver, was brandy there. Her father was and she drew her cloak close up to her snoring up-stairs as she stole to her eyes, as if that might hide her. Before she could make out the gaunt, wizened old man, with coal-black face and hands, she knew whom to expect. "Rab Cuick! "Mistress Hay!" Her alert nature threw off its shy-dent that Rab Cuick thought that Tarness. She motioned him to kneel at pow household slept deep. When the other side of her from Broomie- Julia opened the door, Broomielaws' laws, discovering the wound mean- foreman was very terse in describing what had happened, and led the way to the spare bedroom with his load; but Rab, who followed, was loudly apologetic about wakening up Julia at such an untimely hour. He followed the ploughman down again, after a short interview with Julia in the bend of the staircase.

while.

66 It's Broomielaws' tatties you're after, Rab," she said sternly.

66

I'm lying o' nights at the pithead fire," he grumbled; "but I'm hungry, and not so supple as I used to be, and Broomielaws' tatties

He was fumbling with an excuse, and with a chamois-leather case for his flute, as black as his hands. She felt in her pocket. Two half-crowns lay in it, her only dowry to Leslie, - and she held them up between Rab's eyes and the moon.

"Go to Broomielaws," she said. "Send one of the bothy-boys to Torrie Town for the doctor, and then rouse the others and bring them on here. You found him here, Rab; and you'll carry him to Tarpow, and waken me up. You understand ?"

Rab's face was as stolid as the paling-stab when he held out his hand for the half-crowns.

"When you bring this to Tarpow," she said, slipping the coins into her pocket again.

Rab Cuick had been gone some twenty minutes, when the faint sound of voices from Broomielaws came to Julia's ear. As the sound drew near, she could make out that Rab was bellowing unnecessary directions. A break in the clouds discovered him and his following making straight for her; and drawing her cloak round her, she slipped through the hedge, and ran for Tarpow.

When she let herself in everything was quiet. She raked together the red cinders in the fireplace, and set the kettle on them. She looked into the

"There's a receipt, Miss Jooley," he had said, as he pocketed the halfcrowns; and handed her her own handkerchief, smeared with blood and coal-dust.

It was very honorable of Rab, of course; but Julia got hot with chagrin at the act.

Broomielaws was laid upon the bed until the arrival of the doctor. When he came, Julia left him and stepped across the passage into her father's room. Once or twice she was called to minister to the wants of the case, but she did not linger. At length she heard Tarpow and the doctor descend, and by and by her father came up to her.

"You can put them off," he girned. "What? Put what off?" she asked.

"The blinkers," he said, with a snap.

That meant death, and her woman's tears came instinctively; yet a smile, half amused, half scornful, fought with them for a place in her eyes and on her face. To hide their conflict, she turned to the window and pulled aside the blind. The moon lay on the bay, and on the waters beyond it, and with almost spiteful emphasis lit up a little speck of white sail well over to the other side. Evidently Leslie had not

lingered at their tryst a minute behind | If a foreigner were to lecture to his the hour.

countrymen about the river Thames, and were to begin by informing them that he had never been above Greenwich, he might be looked upon as an impostor; and perhaps I am not much better, for I have never been higher up the river than Philæ, six hundred and ten miles above Cairo. For information regarding anything higher up, I must go, like you, to the works of

At the stab to her pride that the discovery gave, the blind dropped from her hand. The next instant she had plucked it aside, as if to scourge her mature sense with the sight of her raw humors. "So that is the end of that," she thought, as she watched the white sail mount to the opposite shore. She would never marry Broomielaws; that had been settled for her. Whether Speke, Baker, Stanley, and our other she ever could have married him was beyond consideration now; yet it seemed to her that it was as likely she should have married him as that she should marry this laddie, who was even now landing on the other side of the Forth. She was a girl when the boy came to her that morning, with the first touch of spring, the harbinger of her womanhood. The boy had sailed away from a woman, years older than himself in knowledge, and ripe in the consciousness of what the world held in store for her. No; she would never marry Teddy. And, indeed, he did not ask her over the Ripon Falls, estimated by again.

I AM to speak to you to-night of the Nile, and I think I may fairly say it is the most famous river in all the world; famous through all the ages, for the civilization that has existed on its banks; famous for its mystic, fabulous rise, about which so many sages and philosophers have pondered; famous for its length, traversing one-fifth the distance from pole to pole; famous, and apparently destined to be famous, for the political combinations that ever centre around it. But I feel I must begin by an apology, for now that Egypt has come so completely within the tourist's range, probably many of my hearers have seen more of the Nile than I have.

1 A lecture delivered at the Royal Institution, on January 25, by Sir Colin Scott-Moncrieff.

great explorers. I shall not, then, detain you to-night with any elaborate account of this upper portion of the river, but will only remind you briefly of that great inland sea, the Victoria Nyanza, in extent only a little less than the American Lake Superior, traversed by the equator, and fed by many rivers, some of them taking their rise as far as 5° S. lat. These rivers form the true source of the Nile, the mystery only solved in the present gen-. eration.

The outlet of this great lake is on its north shore, where the river rushes

Speke at only four hundred or five hundred feet wide, and with a drop of twelve feet. Thence the river's course is in a north-west direction for two hundred and seventy miles, to where it thunders over the Murchison Falls, a cliff of one hundred and twenty feet high. Soon after that it joins the northern end of Baker's Lake, the Albert Nyanza, but only to leave it again, and to pursue its course through a great marshy land for more than six hundred miles, to where the Bahr Gazelle joins it from the west; a little further down the great Saubat tributary comes in on the east. This is the region in which the river is obstructed by islands of floating vegetation, which, if checked in their course, at last block up its whole width, and form solid obstructions known as sadds, substantial enough to be used as bridges, and obstacles, of course, to navigation, until they are cleared away. The waters of the Saubat are of very light color, and tinge the whole river, which, above its junction, is green and unwholesome,

from the long chain of marshes which be easy to derive any clear impression it traverses. Hence it is called the from this bare recital of mileage. Let White Nile. Six hundred miles fur-me try to convey to you in some other ther brings us to Khartoum, where the ways the idea of the length of the Blue Nile from the Abyssinian moun- Nile. Standing on the bridge at Cairo, tains joins it, and at two hundred miles I used to reflect that I was just about still further to the north it is joined by half-way between the source of the the Atbara River, also from Abyssinia, Nile and the White Sea. Or to put it a torrent rather than a river. another way: if we could suppose a river crossing our English Channel, and that the Thames should find its outlet in the Euphrates and the Persian Gulf, that river would be about as long as the Nile.

In this short sketch of the course of the Nile, I must not forget to mention one interesting feature. About forty miles south of Cairo, the low Libyan chain of hills which bounds the Nile valley on the west is broken by a gap, through which the waters of the river can flow, and beyond this gap lies a saucer-shaped depression called the Fayúm, of about four hundred square miles in area, sloping down to a lake of considerable size, the surface of whose waters stands about one hundred and thirty feet below that of the sea. This lake is known as the Birket el Kurún.

Baker gives a graphic account of how he was encamped by the dry bed of the Atbara on June 22, 1861. The heat was intense, the country was parched with drought. During the night the cry went forth that the floods were coming, and in the morning he found himself on the banks of a river, he says, five hundred yards wide and from fifteen to twenty feet deep. All nature had sprung into life. A little north of the junction of the Atbara is Berber, whence you will remember is the short cut to Suakin in the Red Sea, which so many thought would have been the true route for our army to take in relieving Gordon. From Khartoum to Assouan is a distance of eleven hundred miles of river, during which it makes two immense curves, for on a straight line the distance is not half so From the time of the earliest Egypmuch, and it is in this part of its course tian records, this province of the that it passes over the six great cata- Fayúm was famed for its fertility, and racts or rapids which block all ordinary to the Egyptian taste for its delightful navigation. The first or furthest north climate. Many of the most precious cataract is just above Assouan, a dis-monuments of antiquity have been tance of seven hundred and fifty miles found in the Fayúm. The famous from the Mediterranean, through the Labyrinth is supposed to have stood country known as Egypt. From the just at its entrance; and what has exjunction of the Atbara to its mouth in cited most interest for the engineer in the Mediterranean, a distance of six- all times, it is here that Herodotus teen hundred and eighty miles, the places that wonderful Lake Maris, Nile receives no tributary. On the which receiving for half the year the contrary, during every mile of its surplus supply of the Nile, rendered course its waters are diminished by it back again in irrigation to Lower evaporation, by absorption, and by irri- Egypt during the other half. Where gation. The river gets less and less as this lake actually was, has excited disit flows through this rainless land, and cussion since any attention has been its maximum volume is to be found paid to ancient Egyptian history. It during the floods at the junction of the seems pretty clear that in earlier days Atbara, and at other seasons at Khar- the Birket el Kurún was of much toum, eighteen hundred and seventy-greater proportions than it is now, but five miles from the Mediterranean.

The whole distance by river from the Victoria Nyanza to the sea is about thirty-five hundred miles. It may not

how it ever could have been large enough to allow of its waters flowing back into the Nile valley when the river was low, without at the same

time drowning the whole Fayúm, is to Egypt from its chain of barren catanot very clear.

racts ?

Now, what are the functions of a As a drainage outlet to a continent, great river, what are the offices which as a long highway, as a source of it renders to man? And first of all, at power, the Nile is great; but not so least in this latitude, we would mention much so as many other rivers. Its the carrying off to the ocean of the unique position is due to the benefit it surplus water that descends from the confers on Egypt in turning it from skies. Nobly does the Nile fulfil this being a desert into being the richest of duty; but with this enormous qualifica- agricultural lands, supporting with ease tion, that it transports the water from a population of about six hundred to tracts where there is too much, and the square mile. Herodotus truly said carries it all free of cost, not to waste Egypt is the gift of the Nile. It more it in the sea, but to bestow it on tracts, than supplies the absence of rain, and where it is of priceless value, more this it does, first, by the extraordinary than taking the place of rain in water-regularity with which it rises and falls; ing the fields.

The next function of a river is to form a highway through the land, and for most of its course the Nile fulfils this duty well too. Gordon considered it possible for steamers to ascend the Nile during the floods from its mouth to the Fola rapids, a distance of about three thousand and forty miles; but at other seasons, the six cataracts cannot be passed. Leaving out the eleven hundred miles which they occupy, there is an unbroken seven hundred and fifty miles in the lower, and nearly twelve hundred miles in the upper river. I cannot look on it as probable that it will ever pay to make navigable canals and locks round these cataracts, as it would entail so much hard rock-cutting.

Another function of a river is to promote industry by the employment of its water-power. We know how valuable is this power even in England, and how much more in countries like Switzerland, where it abounds, and on the great rivers of America. Excepting a few very rude wooden wheels in the Fayúm, I do not know, through all the annals of the past, of a single waterwheel ever turned by the power of the Nile. But that power exists to an almost unlimited extent. And may we not prophesy that some day in the future, when that long stretch of Nubian cataracts has fallen into civilized hands, and when we know how to transmit electric energy with economy, that then our descendants will draw wealth

and secondly, by the fertilizing matter which the waters carry in suspension, and bestow upon the land. Imagine what it would be to the English farmer if he knew exactly when it would rain and when it would be sunshine. When the Irrigation Department of Egypt is properly administered, the Egyptian farmer possesses this certainty, and he has this further advantage that it is not merely water that is poured over his lands, but, during nearly half the year, water charged with the finest manure.

According to the early legend, the rise of the Nile is due to the tears shed by Isis over the tomb of Osiris, and the texts on the Pyramids allude to the night every year on which these teardrops fall. The worship of Isis and Osiris has long passed away, but to this day every native of Egypt knows the Lailet en Nuktah, the night in which a miraculous drop falls into the river, and causes it to rise. It is the night of June 17. Herodotus makes no allusion to this legend of Osiris. In his time, he says, the Greeks gave three reasons for the river's rise. He believed in none of them, but considered, as the most ridiculous of all, that which ascribed the floods to the melting of snows, as if there could possibly be snows in such a hot region. It was many centuries after Herodotus's time when the snowy mountains of central Africa were discovered.

The heavy rains commence in the basin of the White Nile during April,

and first slowly drive down upon Egypt | teen thousand cubic feet per second at the green, stagnant waters of that Cairo, but some years there is not marshy region. These appear at Cairo more than ten thousand cubic feet per about June 15. About a fortnight later second passing Cairo in June, and the real flood begins, for the rains have within three months after this may set in in Abyssinia by May 15, and the have increased forty-fold. Blue Nile brings down from the moun- Until this century, the irrigation of tains its supply of the richest muddy Egypt only employed the flood waters water. It is something of the color of the river, and it was this that made and nearly of the consistency of choc-it the granary of the world. No doubt, olate, and the rise is very rapid, as rude machines for raising Nile water much sometimes as three feet per diem, were used at all seasons and from all for the Athara torrent having saturated times. But by these it was not possiits great sandy bed, is now in full flood | ble to irrigate on a large scale, and in also. The maximum flood is reached reality they were only employed for at Assouan about September 1, and it irrigating vegetables or gardens, or would reach Cairo some four days later, other small patches of land. It must were it not that during August and not be thought that the water of the September the water is being diverted flooded river is ever allowed to flow on to the land, and the whole Nile val- where it lists over the lands. The genley becomes a great lake. For this eral slope of the valley on each side is reason the maximum arrives at Cairo away from the river, a feature which about the beginning of October. The the Nile shares with all Deltaic streams. rains cease in Abyssinia about the mid- Along each edge of the river, and foldle of September, and the floods of the lowing its course, is an earthen emBlue Nile and Atbara rapidly decrease; bankment, high enough not to be but in the mean time the great lakes topped by the highest flood. In Upper and marshes are replenished in the Egypt, the valley of which seldom exupper regions, and slowly give off their ceeds six miles in width, a series of supplies, on which the river subsists, embankments have been thrown up, until the following June. Yearly this abutting on their inner ends against phenomenon presents itself in Egypt, those along the river's edge, and on and with the most marvellous regular- their outer ends on the ascending sides ity. A late rise is not more than about of the valley. The whole country is three weeks later than an early rise. thus divided into a series of oblongs, In average years the height of the flood surrounded by embankments on three at Assouan is about twenty-five and sides, and by the slope of the desert one-half feet above the minimum sup-hills on the fourth. In Lower Egypt, ply. If it rises twenty-nine feet above this minimum, it means peril to the whole of Egypt, and the irrigation engineer has a hard time of it for two months. If the river only rises twenty feet above the minimum, it means that whole tracts of the valley will never be submerged. Such a poor flood has happened only once in modern times, in 1877, and the result was more serious than the devastation caused by the most violent excess.

These oblong

where in ancient days there were several branches of the river, this system was somewhat modified, but was in principle the same. areas vary in extent from sixty thousand to three thousand or four thou sand acres, and the slope being away from the river, it is easy to cut short, deep canals in the banks, which fill as the flood rises, and carry the precious mud-charged water into these great flats, or, as they are termed, basins of The mean flood discharge at Cairo is irrigation. There the water remains about two hundred and eighty thou- for a month or more, some three or sand cubic feet per second, the maxi-four feet deep, depositing its mud, and mum about four hundred thousand. then at the end of the flood it may The mean lowest Nile is about four-either be run off direct into the reced