rack" is illicitly sold by a cyclopean Arab. No sooner is this
accomplished, and he slinks back to his kitchen, furtively watching the
windows and wiping his treacherous mouth with the back of his dirty
yellow hand, than he feels himself obliged to again rush out and indulge
in a war of words with the old man who has brought the daily supply of
water to the household.

This is a very dirty old man, bare as to his legs and feet, and without
any toes to speak of. He is clothed in a goat-skin, as is also the
water, for he carries that blessed commodity on his back, in a goat-skin
that is distended like an over-fed beast, with its legs "foreshortened"
and all in the air, like a "shipwrecked tea-table."

The greatly overtasked cook has scarcely had time to recover from this
sally, when he feels himself called upon to again issue forth and attack
the donkey-boy, a small and inoffensive child who brings him vegetables,
which the patient little donkey carries in two panniers slung over his
back.

After invoking upon the head of this child a string of polyglot curses,
one of which is that his progeny, to the sixth generation, maybe born
with their faces upside-down, he again retreats to his kitchen, gives
the pudding a vicious punch and the fire a morsel of charcoal.

Soon he must go and squat in the sand at the back of the house, safe
from all fear of observation, and play a game of dominoes with "Nicolo,"
the cook of the neighboring house.

Then he must smoke two or three cigarettes, which he deftly rolls with
his dirty yellow fingers.

Is it surprising that after these manifold exertions his exhausted
nature demands repose? He stretches himself in the warm white sand, and,
indifferent to the sun and oblivious of the fleas, he falls into a sweet
sleep.

For the pudding? Let us draw the mantle of silence over that heavy,
stately ruin. When he wakes to find the ruin he has wrought, he will
weep and wail and beat his breast, and call upon _Allah_ to witness that
never--not for an instant--has he left the kitchen.

And in his heart he will secretly rejoice.

The Moslem servant always secretly rejoices in the annoyances and
discomfitures of his Christian employer. If that Christian employer is
met by annoyance and discomfiture while attempting to keep up any custom
associated with his religion, or to celebrate any Christian holiday, the
Moslem servant is especially and particularly pleased.

And in this he obeys one of