s of our treaties shall be strictly adhered
to, and moreover that no protection certificates shall be valid unless
countersigned by our Foreign Commissioner El Ghassal. If I rule here,
I will put an end to this man's doings."

"On my head and eyes be the words of my Lord."

"And remind him further that the permits for the free passage of
goods at the customs are granted only for his personal use, for the
necessities of his household, and that the way Haj Taib writes he has
been selling them is a disgrace. The man is a regular swindler, and
the less we have to do with him the better. As for his pretended
information about his colleagues, there may be a good deal of truth
in it, but I have the word of the English minister, who is about as
honest as any of them, that this Mavrogordato is a born villain,
and that if his Government is not greedy for my country on its own
account, it wants to sell me to some more powerful neighbour in
exchange for its protection. Greece is only a miserable fag-end of
Europe."

"Our Lord knows: may God give him victory," and the Wazeer bowed
himself out to consider how best he might obey his instructions, not
exactly liking the task. On returning home he despatched a messenger
to the quarters of the Embassy, appointing an hour on the morrow for a
conference, and when this came the Ambassador found himself in for a
stormy interview. The Wazeer, with his snuff-box in constant use,
sat cool and collected on his mattress on the floor, the Ambassador
sitting uneasily on a chair before him. Though the language used
was considerably modified in filtering through the brain of the
interpreter, the increasing violence of tone and gesture could not be
concealed, and were all but sufficiently comprehensible in themselves.
The Ambassador protested that if the remainder of the demands were
to be refused, he was entitled to at least as much as the French
representative had had to shut his mouth last time he came to Court,
and affected overwhelming indignation at the treatment he had
received.

"Besides," he added, "I have the promise of His Majesty the Sultan
himself that certain of them should be paid in full, and I cannot
abandon those. I have informed my Government of the Sultan's words."

"Dost suppose that my master is a dog of a Nazarene, that he should
keep his word to thee? Nothing thou may'st say can alter his decision.
The claims that have been allowed in writing shall be paid by the
Customs