A FELLAH WOMAN.

Dunstan Times, Issue 1092, 4 May 1883, Page 4

A FELLAH WOMAN.

Like a commonplace Oriental, she takes life as she finds it, and applies her innate fatalistic philosophy to all spheres of her experience, In to sphere does she display it more conspicuously than in her maternal losses. When you see her i etuvning from the canal with her earthenware pitcher poised on her head and her blue veil drawn halt over her face in deserence to the religious precept—very carelessly observed in Egypt - that a woman should not show her countenance to strangers of the other sex, you might readiiy assume that her graceful, elastic figure, only half concealed under the loose, flexible, dark blue garment which constitutes her whole attire, had never known the fatigues and sufferings of maternity, but in reality she had borne no less than uix childien, but of these only two have survived. Though by no means a heartless mother, she did not grieve long when her little ones were successively taken from her. She had never heard of the survival of the fittest as a scientific dogma, but she had remarked, within the limits of her own experience and personal observation, that weakly children always die, especially at harvest time, when mothers have less time than usual to attend to domestic affairs, and she knows that a sicklyJchild, instead of being a help to the family, was a burden to itsell and its parents in this hard working world. Such reflections did not prevent her from weeping bitterly when the little ones had ceased to breathe and were taken away to be buried in a sandy knoll adjoining the villiage, but in a few days the wound to her maternal instinc- s healed, and she was ready to admit that Allah 'did well to take weakly children to himself .—London Times.