A very interesting account was published in the Daily News
of Tuesday of the escape of Father Bononi from El Obeid, thanks to the assistance of Major Turner, who supplied the means for effecting the good Father's escape, and took charge of him when he had effected it. The story of his long stay in El Obeid, both before and after it fell into the power of the Mahdi, is, of course, full of horrors, but parts of it have a less ghastly and even a picturesque interest, —especially the description of the grave old Turk who commanded the Egyptian forces, and who met his death with the utmost firmness, cursing his enemies in the most scornful way, though he had suffered all the horrors of the famine. He had tried to blow up the powder magazine when -the defence became hopeless, but had been prevented by his own officers from doing so. Father Bononi's picture of the late Mahdi himself is not wanting in a certain grandeur. It seems certain that he had far more of true religion in him than the people around him, who were of a much more sanguinary type.
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