OFFICIAL duty sent me not long ago to visit a small town on one of the lower reaches of the Tigris. I was not sorry to exchange the close atmosphere of the capital for the fresher air of the country, to leave behind for a brief space the noises and smells of modern Baghdad. The city may be, doubtless is, a cleaner place than it was a decade ago, but the reforming hand of civilisation has not made it more beautiful. Empty kerosene tins have replaced the graceful watering-pots of the women, rusty sheets of corrugated iron the painted woodwork of the houses which lean across the narrow streets; and dilapidated Ford cars are rapidly ousting the gaily-caparisoned horses, which one still sees, unsuperseded, in the districts.

I made the journey downstream in a paddle-steamer belonging to the "Bait Lynch."

VOL. CCXVIII.—NO. MCCCXVII.

Old as she was, and almost worn out after her forty years of struggle against the strong current, she was spotlessly clean, as Tigris boats are only clean when a British skipper commands them. As we waited in the wide sunlit river, with its few lazy balams and its gleaming white gulls swaying on the ripples, I asked the captain when he meant to leave Basrah on his return journey. He must have forgotten the perhaps apocryphal tale of the skipper in the early days of Tigris navigation, who, having shocked Muslim opinion by omitting to qualify his rigid programme with the pious proviso "in sha Allah-God willing," was duly punished for his presumption by the burning of his ship. The present captain, who sinned in the same way in answering my question, met with a lighter retribution in the shape of

A