no fine distinctions. When he meets a bad
Sultan he punches his head. When he meets a good Sultan, nothing is too
good to believe concerning him.

And he accepts the one as naturally as he does the other. He has no
moral enthusiasms or enthusiasms of any kind. It is merely an obvious
thing to him that right should triumph and wrong should fail. He does
not play with his emotions. I remember how, one night, in relating the
fall of Abdul Hamid, Harrington had worked himself up to an
extraordinary pitch of excitement. Never had that despot been painted in
such horrid colours; and after he had told how the palace guards rose
against the Constitution, and how the Young Turks marched upon
Constantinople, and how the craven tyrant, crying "Don't hurt me, don't
hurt me," was dragged from his bed by the good soldiers and clapped into
prison, Harrington turned, all aglow, to Bob, and waited for the boy to
echo his enthusiasm. But Bob waited till the cell-door clanged behind
the Unspeakable Turk, and said: "Now tell me about the giraffe that fell
into the water."

I spoke of the good Sultan. Of course there had to be one, and
Harrington found him in the same book with the bad Sultan. And when he
had studied the somewhat stolid features of Mohammed V for a little
while, it was inevitable that Bob should ask what a good Sultan did.
Harrington was in difficulties again. It was impossible to explain that
at bottom there really is no such thing as a good Sultan; that they are
as a rule cruel and immoral, and always expensive; and that at best they
are harmless, if somewhat stupid, survivals. But since the very idea of
a bad Sultan demands a good one, Harrington tried to satisfy Bob by
investing Mohammed V with a large number of negative virtues. "A good
Sultan does not shoot people, or burn down houses or throw women into
jail or whip little children." The portrait failed to please. Bob's
faith demanded something robust to cling to; and in the end he compelled
his father to do for the good Sultan the opposite of what he had done
for the bad one. Mohammed V stands to-day invested with all the virtues
that have been manifested on earth from Enoch to Florence Nightingale.

And yet of the two, Bob and his father, I must say again that it is Bob
who has the more truthful and healthy outlook upon life, and it is good
for Harrington to rehearse with him the history of the fall of Abdul
Hamid II three or four times a week. Bob has no flabby