Chapter XIII Dervish's Mission

This last reference, which is to Lord Stanley of Alderley, is of importance. He was a very old and close friend of mine, but we had hitherto differed about Egypt, and on this ground. He had been many years before, in the time of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, Attaché to our Embassy at Constantinople, and had imbibed there the extreme philo-Turkish views then in fashion with Englishmen. In 1860, while travelling in the East Indies, he had become a Mohammedan, and I had first made his acquaintance in a rather singular way. I was on my way in the autumn of that year from Athens and Constantinople to England, and was travelling up the Danube when there came on board our steamer at one of the Roumanian ports the family of an ex-hospodar, and with them an Englishman of no very distinguished appearance, and of rather plain, brusque manners, whom I took to be their tutor or secretary. As our journey lasted several days, I made friends with my fellow traveller, and found him interesting from his great knowledge of the East, but he did not tell me his name. On our arrival, however, at Vienna, he proposed to go with me to the Embassy, and I then discovered who he was, and we travelled on together to Munich, where his younger brother, Lyulph Stanley, a Balliol undergraduate, was learning German, and in this way I became acquainted little by little with all his family. I came to know him very well, and I take this opportunity of saying that, though he was undoubtedly eccentric in his ideas, he remained through