l adventure more at length; for I supped alone,
and had been some time stretched upon my mattress on the floor before
Rashid came in and spread his bed beside me.

'Art thou awake, O my dear lord?' he whispered. 'By Allah, thou didst
wrong to give that sergeant any money. I had made thy name so great
that but to look on thee was fee sufficient for a poor, lean dog like
him.'

He then was silent for so long a while that I imagined he had gone to
sleep. But, suddenly, he whispered once again:

'O my dear lord, forgive me the disturbance, but hast thou our
revolver safe?'

'By Allah, yes! Here, ready to my hand.'

'Good. But it would be better for the future that I should bear our
whip and our revolver. I have made thy name so great that thou
shouldst carry nothing.'

CHAPTER IV

THE COURTEOUS JUDGE

We were giving a dinner-party on that day to half a dozen Turkish
officers, and, when he brought me in my cup of tea at seven-thirty
a.m., Rashid informed me that our cook had been arrested. The said
cook was a decent Muslim, but hot-tempered, and something of a blood
in private life. At six a.m., as he stood basking in the sunlight in
our doorway, his eyes had fallen on some Christian youths upon their
way to college, in European clothes, with new kid gloves and
silver-headed canes. Maddened with a sense of outrage by that horrid
sight, he had attacked the said youths furiously with a wooden ladle,
putting them to flight, and chasing them all down the long acacia
avenue, through two suburbs into the heart of the city, where their
miserable cries for help brought the police upon him. Rashid, pursuing
in vain attempts to calm the holy warrior, had seen him taken into
custody still flourishing the ladle; but could tell me nothing of his
after fate, having at that point deemed it prudent to retire, lest he,
too, might be put in prison by mistake.

It was sad. As soon as I was up and dressed, I wrote to Hamdi Bey, the
chief of our intended visitors, informing him of the mishap which
would prevent our giving him and his comrades a dinner at all worthy
of their merit. By the time that I had finished dressing, Rashid had
found a messenger to whom the note was given with an order to make
haste. He must have run the whole way there and back, for, after
little more than half an hour, he stood before me, breathless and with
streaming brow, his bare legs dusty to the knee. Rashid had then gone
out to do some marketing