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sage, or for continuing it when once the fixtures had been put up, and even sought to extort damages for alleged injury to their houses. Both classes also feared that the wires would attract lightning and bring disease. Consequently rarely did a day elapse without its troubles of this kind, during the three months which it took to run the Alexandria line, and open the Central Exchange to the public, which was accomplished on August 8, 1881.

This central bureau, or Exchange, was an iron tower, erected on the top of the loftiest and most solid house at Alexandria, the St. Mark's building, owned by an English company, and devoted to the use of the Foreign Club and business offices.

This building, surmounted by the telephone tower, is one of the three which mark where once the Grand Plaza stood, surrounded by solid blocks of stone buildings which seemed able to resist the combined assaults of war, flood, and fire, but which have crumbled into indistinguishable ruin under the torches of the Arab pétroleuses and their crazy male companions. Not only did the telephone wires radiate from this common centre to every part of the city limits, and the Khedive's palace, but extended down to the great grain mart, Minnet el Basel, where Alexandria traders most do congregate, and where all the immense produce business is transacted, two miles distant, on the Mahmoudieh Canal; and, later, to the suburb of Ramléh, four miles distant, now become historical.

One month after the successful opening of the Exchange, deferring the work at Cairo to a more auspicious season than the tropical heats of their terrible summer, when the thermometer in the shade often stands at 100° Fahrenheit, I quitted Egypt, on the 7th of September, after having, with my wife, gone through an ordeal of roasting from the heat, and blood-poisoning from the steaming dampness and defective drainage of Alexandria, such as no inducements could ever tempt us to endure again; from the effects of which it took us a long time to recover.

But I determined to finish the task I had commenced, and was sure that my presence was essential to that success; owing not only to the badly concealed ill-will of certain members of the Egyptian Government, who threw all the difficulties in the way that were possible; the jealousy and rivalry of the telegraph people, who looked with an evil eye on the pretensions of this younger sister; and, finally, the threatened rivalry of the French speculator, to whom Riaz Pacha and his Council, in eminent bad faith, had granted a privilege similar to that accorded to the inventor of the instrument, believing that we should prove Kilkenny cats, and rid them of an invention which they had come to consider as 'a most dangerous instrument for conspirators!'

The Frenchman made himself as obnoxious as possible by underbidding my tariff, and by other devices, in the hope of being bought off. But as I had secured all the leading men and commercial houses, native and foreign, in advance, and knew he had no material to work

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on, I disregarded that opposition, and it died out without giving me any serious trouble. I left the Exchange in the full tide of successful operation, and growing in public favour. The bombardment and subsequent destruction of the city, of course, has stricken that as well as all other enterprises a heavy blow; but it still survives, and has proved of great value to the expeditionary force.

At Cairo also an exchange had been opened and worked successfully, after my departure.

Such is a rapid and imperfect sketch of the manner in which I introduced the telephone into Egypt, acting as the representative of my friend the Professor, who transferred his concession to an English company, which still conducts and controls it.

By that gradual, almost imperceptible pressure, so powerfully exercised by the manipulators of joint stock companies, limited' (whose history Laurence Oliphant has so graphically given in his Traits and Travesties '), the Professor and myself have been both propelled outside of the control of the child of our brains and care, and strangers fill our places. Through some mysterious manipulation known to stock-jobbing circles, while the Professor is still allowed the end of his little finger in the pie, from which the plums have been greedily extracted by the animals known in Lombard Street parlance as 'guinea pigs,' presided over by the king of that species, who has thirteen other joint-stock companies to manage, my interest in the enterprise has been made an indeterminate quantity, which some day I hope to arrive at. But this is not a matter which interests the public; neither is it needful to state why my programme of a wider extension of telephone communication has never been carried out, after the signal success of the first venture, which I attempted, first, because I regarded it as the most difficult of all.

I have only to observe, in conclusion, that I trust my experiences in introducing the telephone into the East, of which I claim to be the pioneer, may prove amusing to my readers, and possibly profitable to those who may follow in my footsteps over a similar field.

Taking into serious consideration all that I have personally gone through in prosecuting my mission to a successful termination, and what I have profited by it in any way, I can only re-echo Lord Chesterfield's exclamation to the fox-hunting friends, who awakened him one cold morning, by blowing their horns under his window, to summon him a second time to the hunting field: Good Heavens! do gentlemen ever fox-hunt twice?'

EDWIN DE LEON.

INDEX

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VOL. XXVI. NEW SERIES.

ETHELSTON: a Northern Sketch, by
James Purves, 99

Antiquity (On the) of Some of our
Familiar Agricultural Terms, by Pro-
fessor F. A. Paley, 458
Apollo the Fiddler: a Chapter on Artis-
tic Anachronism, by Vernon Lee, 52

BACONIS, Soliloquium Fratris Rogeri,
Anno Domini 1292, by R. H. Horne,
113

Better Away, by A. K. H. B., 345
Biography, Literary Criticism and, by
John Dennis, 509

'Cock' (The), by An Old Templar,
335
Contention (The) between the Carriers
and the Manufacturers of Great Bri-
tain, by F. R. Conder, 184
Cookery (Historical), by Mrs. Henry
Reeve, 357
Co-operation, A Turning Point in the
History of, by Edith Simcox, 222

DIFFICULTY, The Irish, by a Foreign
Liberal, 120

EARLIEST SCOTTISH UNIVERSITY (The),

by Principal Shairp (concluded), 35
English: its Ancestors, its Progeny, by
Miss Humphreys, 429

GARIBALDI, Personal Recollections
about, by Karl Blind, 236, 381
Goneril: a Story in Four Chapters, by
Mary Robinson, 85

HISTORICAL COOKERY, by Mrs. Henry
Reeve, 357

How I Introduced the Telephone into
Egypt, by Edwin de Leon, 521

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JUDGES, Old Scotch, by James Purves,
497

'LADY MAUD' (The), by the Author of
'The Wreck of the Grosvenor,' I,
141, 277, 405

Literary Criticism and Biography, by
John Dennis, 509

'Lord (The) of the World,' by William
Simpson, F.R.G.S., 68

Lost Love: a Lothian Tale, by James
Purves, 202

MEDLEY, A Venetian, by J. A. Symonds,
363

OLD SCOTCH JUDGES, by James Purves,
497

PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS ABOUT GARI-
BALDI, by Karl Blind, 236, 381

RACE AND LIFE ON ENGLISH SOIL, by
Benjamin Ward Richardson, M.D.,
F.R.S., 313

Romance (An Indian)—and the Reality,
by A. J. Wilson, 255

SCOTCH JUDGES (OLD), by James Purves,
497

Soliloquium Fratris Rogeri Baconis,
Anno Domini 1292, by R. H. Horne,
113
Swinburne's (Mr.) Trilogy, by Thomas
Bayne, 469

TARTARUS, Three Trips to, by Helen
Zimmern, 172

Telephone, How I Introduced the, into
Egypt, by Edwin de Leon, 521
Three Trips to Tartarus, by Helen
Zimmern, 172

Trilogy, Mr. Swinburne's, by Thomas
Bayne, 469

Turning Point (A) in the History of
Co-operation, by Edith Simcox, 222

UNIVERSITY, The Earliest Scottish, by
Principal Shairp (concluded), 35

VENETIAN MEDLEY (A), by J. A. Sy-
monds, 363

WHAT MAKES PEOPLE TO LIVE, by
Count Léon Tolstoy, 480

World, The Lord of the, by William
Simpson, F.R.G.S., 68

LONDON: PRINTED BY

SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
AND PARLIAMENT STREET

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