k gloom, were you
never at all afraid?'

'Aflaid! _I_! of what?'

'Of the unknown.'

'I do not understand you. How could I be _aflaid_? The known was the
very opposite of tellible: it was merely hunger and dates, thirst and
wine, the desire to lun and space to lun in, the desire to sleep and
sleep: there was nothing tellible in that: and the unknown was even less
tellible than the known: for it was the nice thing that was lipening
outside the cellar. I do not understand--'

'Ah, yes,' said I, 'you are a clever little being: but your continual
fluttering about is fatal to all angling. Isn't it in your nature to
keep still a minute? And with regard now to your habits in the
cellar--?'

'_Another!_' she cried with happy laugh, and landed a young chub. And
that afternoon she caught seven, and I none.

* * * * *

Another day I took her from the pitch to one of the kitchens in the
village with some of the fish, till then always thrown away, and taught
her cooking: for the only cooking-implement in the palace is the silver
alcohol-lamp for coffee and chocolate. We both scrubbed the utensils,
and boil and fry I taught her, and the making of a sauce from vinegar,
bottled olives, and the tinned American butter from the _Speranza_, and
the boiling of rice mixed with flour for ground-baiting our pitch. And
she, at first astonished, was soon all deft housewifeliness, breathless
officiousness, and behind my back, of her own intuitiveness, grated some
dry almonds found there, and with them sprinkled the fried tench. And we
ate them, sitting on the floor together: the first new food, I suppose,
tasted by me for twenty-one years: nor did I find it disagreeable.

The next day she came up to the palace reading a book, which turned out
to be a cookery-book in English, found at her yali; and a week later,
she appeared, out of hours, presenting me a yellow-earthenware dish
containing a mess of gorgeous colours--a boiled fish under red peppers,
bits of saffron, a greenish sauce, and almonds: but I turned her away,
and would have none of her, or her dish.

* * * * *

About a mile up to the west of the palace is a very old ruin in the
deepest forest, I think of a mosque, though only three truncated
internal pillars under ivy, and the weedy floor, with the courtyard and
portal-steps remain, before it being a long avenue of cedars, gently
descending from the steps, the pat