sheykhs put themselves into communication with him. To all he returned what good answers he could and help as far as his limited power extended, and wherever men met him his fine presence, attractive smile, and dignified eloquence in conversation conveyed a favourable impression.
In personal appearance Arabi was at that time singularly well endowed for the part he was called upon to play in Egyptian history as representative of his race. A typical fellah, tall, heavy-limbed, and somewhat slow in his movements, he seemed to symbolize that massive bodily strength which is so characteristic of the laborious peasant of the Lower Nile. He had nothing in him of the alertness of a soldier, and there was a certain deliberation in his gesture which gave him the dignity one so often sees in village sheykhs. His features in repose were dull, and his eyes had an abstracted look like those of a dreamer, and it was only when he smiled and spoke that one saw the kindly and large intelligence within. Then his face became illumined as a dull landscape by the sun. To Turkish and Circassian pashas this type of man seemed wholly negligible, that of the peasant boor they had for generations dominated and held in slavery and forced to labour for them without pay, and it seemed impossible to them he should be used otherwise than as a tool in their astute hands. Riaz from first to last despised him, and even the intellectual Reformers of the Azhar took little count of him as a political force. But with his own peasant class his rusticity was all in his favour. He was one of themselves, they perceived, but with their special qualities intensified and made glorious by the power they credited him with, and by the semi-religious culture he had acquired at the Azhar superior to their own. It must be remembered that in all Egyptian history, for at least three hundred years, no mere fellah had ever risen to a position of any political eminence in Egypt, or had appeared in the light of a reformer, or whispered a word of possible revolt. I doubt, however, whether his qualities alone, which were after all rather negative ones, or his talents, of which he had as yet given no proof, would have sufficed to bring him to the front as a National leader, but for the unwise persecution to which