surrounded
by barbed wire entanglements or a strip of No Man's Land. Also, and
rightly, he is stern to malefactors and fakers of all sorts.

It would have been sad if any one so un-Caliphlike as William
Hohenzollern had got his eisenbahn through to Bagdad, the city sacred to
the memory of a genial despot who spent his cabarabian nights in an
excellent fashion. That, however, has nothing to do with the story.

Mr. and Mrs. Caliph are people so delightful that they leave in one's
mind a warm afterglow of benevolent sociability. They have an infinite
interest and curiosity in the hubbub of human moods and crotchets that
surrounds us all. And when one leaves their doorsill one has a genial
momentum of the spirit that carries one on rapidly and cheerfully. One
has an irresistible impulse to give something away, to stroke the noses
of horses, to write a kind letter to the fuel administrator or do almost
anything gentle and gratuitous. The Caliphs of the world don't know it,
but that is the effect they produce on their subjects.

As we left, Mr. and Mrs. Caliph pressed upon us an apple. One of those
gorgeous apples that seem to grow wrapped up in tissue paper, and are
displayed behind plate glass windows. A huge apple, tinted with gold and
crimson and pale yellow shading off to pink. The kind of apple whose
colors are overlaid with a curious mist until you polish it on your
coat, when it gleams like a decanter of claret. An apple so large and
weighty that if it had dropped on Sir Isaac Newton it would have
fractured his skull. The kind of apple that would have made the garden
of Eden safe for democracy, because it is so beautiful no one would have
thought of eating it.

That was the kind of apple the Caliph gave us.

It was a cold night, and we walked down Chestnut street dangling that
apple, rubbing it on our sleeve, throwing it up and down and catching it
again. We stopped at a cigar store to buy some pipe tobacco. Still
running on Caliph, by which we mean still beguiled by his geniality, we
fell into talk with the tobacconist. "That's a fine apple you have
there," said he. For an instant we thought of giving it to him, but then
we reflected that a man whose days are spent surrounded by rich cigars
and smokables is dangerously felicitous already, and a sudden joy might
blast his blood vessels.

The shining of the street lamps was reflected on the polished skin of
our fruit as we went our way. As we held it in our arms