She had never been from home before, and she was now busy upon the self-imposed task of bringing the East up to the standard of Massachusetts.

She had hardly landed in Egypt before she realised that the country needed putting to rights, and since the conviction struck her she had been very fully occupied.

The saddle-galled donkeys, the starved pariah dogs, the flies round the eyes of the babies, the naked children, the importunate beggars, the ragged, untidy women--they were all challenges to her conscience, and she plunged in bravely at her work of reformation.

As she could not speak a word of the language, however, and was unable to make any of the delinquents understand what it was that she wanted, her passage up the Nile left the immemorial East very much as she had found it, but afforded a good deal of sympathetic amusement to her fellow-travellers.

No one enjoyed her efforts more than her niece, Sadie, who shared with Mrs.