find that "Natty" had been called that morning abroad on account of the illness or death of a near relation, I forget which. We consequently did not see him, but he had left a message instead, begging me to write him my views. I regret the accident which prevented the meeting, for it would have been interesting, though I do not suppose it would have effected any good. I have often wondered since what would have been the nature of the "intelligent understanding" so much desired; and I have sometimes suspected that the common financial argument might have been tried with me in the shape of shares to bring about an arrangement with Arabi for the betrayal of his political trust. Some such, it seems, was tried upon Arabi two months later through another channel. Nothing, however, came of the visit, except that I wrote my memorandum, too long a one here to quote, the object of it being to recommend, as a matter of policy, that financiers who had interests in Egypt should accept the revolution that had occurred and make the best of it, and predicted that bondholders would lose more by a war than by conciliation. I have since been told that Rothschild, who, after great tribulation and anguish of mind at the time of the bombardment of Alexandria and nearly in despair thinking he had lost his millions eventually recovered the value of all, resented my prediction of evil as that of a false prophet. But that does not greatly concern me. My memorandum was drawn up not in his interest as creditor but in that of his Egyptian debtors.
Another curious entry, 28th March, gives a hint of the ideas current in Printing House Square. This was the first time I had been to the "Times" office, and Button was again my cicerone. We saw there Macdonald, the manager, with the object of trying to get him to send out a new correspondent to Cairo, who should give the "Times" independent news, and Mackenzie Wallace had been thought of for the purpose. But Macdonald, with Scotch caution, would not go to the expense. He was quite satisfied from a business point of view, he said, with the kind of news Scott, their correspondent at Alexandria, was sending them. English people, he said, had only two interests in Egypt, the Suez Canal and