We order tea, and get it after some
difficulty; but it is more because the attendant guesses what we would
be likely to ask for than because he understands us that we eventually
are provided with a small pot of quite decent tea.

While we drink the children gather from afar; every one in Haifa under
the age of fourteen is there I should say. They glue themselves to the
fence and force their little faces between the posts, or spike their
chins on the top and then watch in solemn deadly earnest the ways of
these strange beings whom fate has so kindly sent to amuse them. The
rest-house attendant does not approve of these manners, so he slips out
of a side-door with a basin of water in his hand and pitches it straight
over the little crew as if they were a flock of intrusive chickens; they
fly, shrieking with delight, and return in thicker swarms than ever
inside of two minutes.

An affable gentleman in a gown seats himself beside us.

"I wish you good-day," he says in English, and we return his greeting.

"I am dragoman here," he continues.

We point to one small girl with a face quite different from that of the
other children, and her hair done in innumerable little tight pigtails,
and ask him who she is. "Nubian," he says. "Eat castor oil, plenty oil,
like it much." We tell him to bring the child to us, but directly he
translates, she flies screaming, is captured by the other children, and
a noise begins like that inside the parrot-house at the Zoo. I explain
that we don't want her to be frightened, but that if she will come and
speak to us she shall have bakshish. The magic word produces instant
calm, the child comes forward at once with coquettish assurance and
when, through the interpreter, we inquire her name, and she tells us it
is "Nafeesa," we give her half a piastre and let her go.

[Illustration: A LITTLE NUBIAN GIRL.]

When we start off again for the steamer the whole crowd follows hard on
our heels, for it is we who provide the free circus to-day. One mite
trotting forward with his eyes glued on us goes smack into a tree and so
hurts his little face that he covers it with a crooked arm and sets off
homewards wailing softly.

This is really a deserving case, even in England it is allowable to
soothe the feelings of a hurt child, so we mutter "Bakshish," and all
the eager crew rush after the little suffering child, yelling,
"Bakshish," and they bring him back triumphantly with the tears already
dried o