ied in the house of
entertainment at work at a nargileh, and evidently the worse for raki.

It is rather a difficult thing to acknowledge, in the face of the great
ruins then about us, with all their associations, that the thought of
our dinner was by this time uppermost in the minds of nearly all our
company. I have generally found, however, in much journeying about this
wicked world, that the amount of condescension and interest with which
one looks upon ancient remains depends very much upon the company in
which one finds one's self, the state of the weather and the state of
one's stomach.

Our worthy entertainer was a man of the world, and understood this
little trait of humanity; so he led us straight to the roofless mosque,
where we were shaded from the afternoon sun, but at the same time had
his cheerful reflection from the upper part of the marble walls, from
which trailed and waved lovely vines and parasites. There we found,
spread upon a spotless cloth which rested on a clean-swept though
cracked pavement parqueted in different marbles, a most delightful and
plentiful luncheon. Shawls and rugs were placed, and we fell to at once,
the Armenian lady playing her part as manfully as she had done in the
saddle, and causing grilled fowls, kibabs and claret-cup to disappear in
a way which reflected upon the capacity of some of the males of the
party.

We had nearly finished our repast when a gypsy-woman peeped in at one of
the doorways, but with instinctive good manners retired again until we
had done with dessert and cigarettes were lighted. Then she came into
the huge unroofed hall in which we were, and brought a pretty girl of
about twelve and a boy of ten, who danced for our amusement a wild sort
of prance with a castanet accompaniment. The mother then begged leave to
divine our fortunes from the coffee-grounds in the cups, with the
contents of which we had just wound up our feast. There is this
difference between Levantine coffee and that made in our Western World:
_grounds_ are essential to the one, and are eagerly shaken up and
swallowed, while in our parts the grounds are the opprobrium of the
cook. There were, however, grounds enough left for the gypsy. But she
made a very mild use of them mostly, predicting "good health and a good
fig-season" to an American officer who did not grow figs and who had the
constitution of a horse. Then she took a handful of pebbles, shells and
the small cubes of stone extrac