A Desert Drama | Page 5

you mean by 're,' Mr. Stephens?
You put 're Rameses the Second' on the last paper you gave me."
"It is a habit I have acquired, Miss Sadie," said Stephens; "it is the
custom in the legal profession when they make a memo."
"Make what, Mr. Stephens?"

"A memo a memorandum, you know. We put re so-and-so to show
what it is about."
"I suppose it's a good short way," said Miss Sadie, "but it feels queer
somehow when applied to scenery or to dead Egyptian kings. 'Re
Cheops,'--doesn't that strike you as funny?"
"No, I can't say that it does," said Stephens.
"I wonder if it is true that the English have less humour than the
Americans, or whether it's just another kind of humour," said the girl.
She had a quiet, abstracted way of talking as if she were thinking aloud.
"I used to imagine they had less, and yet, when you come to think of it,
Dickens and Thackeray and Barrie, and so many other of the
humourists we admire most, are Britishers. Besides, I never in all my
days heard people laugh so hard as in that London theatre. There was a
man behind us, and every time he laughed auntie looked round to see if
a door had opened, he made such a draught. But you have some funny
expressions, Mr. Stephens!"
"What else strikes you as funny, Miss Sadie?"
"Well, when you sent me the temple ticket and the little map, you
began your letter, 'Enclosed, please find,' and then at the bottom, in
brackets, you had '2 enclo.'"
"That is the usual form in business."
"Yes, in business," said Sadie, demurely, and there was a silence.
"There's one thing I wish," remarked Miss Adams, in the hard, metallic
voice with which she disguised her softness of heart, "and that is, that I
could see the Legislature of this country and lay a few cold-drawn facts
in front of them, I'd make a platform of my own, Mr. Stephens, and run
a party on my ticket. A Bill for the compulsory use of eyewash would
be one of my planks, and another would be for the abolition of those
Yashmak veil things which turn a woman into a bale of cotton goods
with a pair of eyes looking out of it."

"I never could think why they wore them," said Sadie; "until one day I
saw one with her veil lifted. Then I knew."
"They make me tired, those women," cried Miss Adams, wrathfully.
"One might as well try to preach duty and decency and cleanliness to a
line of bolsters. Why, good land, it was only yesterday at Abou-Simbel,
Mr. Stephens, I was passing one of their houses,--if you can call a
mud-pie like that a house,--and I saw two of the children at the door
with the usual crust of flies round their eyes, and great holes in their
poor little blue gowns! So I got off my donkey, and I turned up my
sleeves, and I washed their faces well with my handkerchief, and sewed
up the rents,--for in this country I would as soon think of going ashore
without my needle-case as without my white umbrella, Mr. Stephens.
Then as I warmed on the job I got into the room,--such a room!--and I
packed the folks out of it, and I fairly did the chores as if I had been the
hired help. I've seen no more of that temple of Abou-Simbel than if I
had never left Boston; but, my sakes, I saw more dust and mess than
you would think they could crowd into a house the size of a Newport
bathing-hut. From the time I pinned up my skirt until I came out, with
my face the colour of that smoke-stack, wasn't more than an hour, or
maybe an hour and a half, but I had that house as clean and fresh as a
new pine-wood box. I had a New York Herald with me, and I lined their
shelf with paper for them. Well, Mr. Stephens, when I had done
washing my hands outside, I came past the door again, and there were
those two children sitting on the stoop with their eyes full of flies, and
all just the same as ever, except that each had a little paper cap made
out of the New York Herald upon his head. But, say, Sadie, it's going on
to ten o'clock, and tomorrow an early excursion."
"It's just too beautiful, this purple sky and the great silver stars," said
Sadie. "Look at the silent desert and the black shadows of the hills. It's
grand, but it's terrible, too; and then when you think that we really are,
as that dragoman said just now, on the very end of civilisation,