out
straight, and heels together on the floor.

Yussuf brought me coffee without waiting to be asked. I paid him
a half-piastre for it, which is half the proper price, and
utterly ignored his expostulation. He touched me on the
shoulder, displayed the coin in the palm of his hand and went
through a prodigious pantomime. I did not even try to appear
interested. He ordered Suliman to explain to me.

"Mafish mukhkh!" said the boy, touching his own forehead.

My real motive was to act as differently as possible from the
white man, who always pays twice what he should. By establishing
the suggestion of accustomed meanness, I hoped to offset any
breaks I might make presently. Spies, and people of that kind,
usually have plenty of money for their needs, so that by acting
the part of a man unused to spending except in minute driblets I
stood a better chance of not being detected.

But I was in luck. I have often noticed, so that it has become
almost an article of creed with me, that luck invariably breaks
that way. It almost never turns up blind. You sit down and wait
for luck, and it all goes to the other fellow. But start to use
your wits, even clumsily, and the luck comes along and squanders
itself on you.

"He is certainly from Damascus," laughed one of the customers.
"The price is a half-piastre in Damascus at the meaner shops."

I did not know anything about Damascus then--had never been
there; but from that minute it never entered the mind of one of
those men to doubt that Damascus was my home-city, so easily
satisfied by trifling suggestions is the unscientific human.
Yussuf went back to his charcoal stove grumbling to himself
in Turkish.

But there was still one question in doubt. They seemed satisfied
that I was really deaf and dumb, but in that land of countless
mission schools and alien speech there is always a chance that
even children know a word or two of French. They tested Suliman
with simple questions, such as who was his mother and where was
he born; but he did not need to act that part, he was utterly
ignorant of French.

So they proceeded to ignore the two of us and turn their
political acrimony loose in French, discussing the maddest, most
unmoral schemes with the gusto of small boys playing pirates.
There seemed to be almost as many rival political parties as men
in the room. The only approach to unity was when they agreed to
accuse and destroy. As for constructive agreement,