friend led the
way to an angle of the building where the hawkers were unusually busy,
and I drew near enough to see that he was now looking covertly all
about him, and for a little seemed at a loss.

'Kum-all-ong! Kume-mol-o-ng! Ku-m-m-m!'

The shrill long-drawn-out cry caused him to turn suddenly, and to
elbow his way, with his prey at his heels, toward a small railed-in
space, wherein, seated on a Turkish ottoman, a little higher than the
genuine, was a swarthy man with beetling brows, big rolling black
eyes, and a fierce moustache bristling underneath a hooked nose. He
wore a red fez, much askew, and his American trousers and waistcoat
were enlivened by a tennis-sash of orange and red and a smoking-coat
faced with vivid green. He was smoking a decorated Turkish
pipe--'Toor-kaish,' he called it--and a low table and sundry decorated
boxes and packages were his sole stock-in-trade.

'Kum-all-ong! he reiterated. 'Kum-e see-e me-e-e smoke! Easy--so--no
noise; so! Soo-vy-nee-yra; Toor-kaish soo-vy-nee-yr matches!' At every
pause a 'soo-vy-nee-yr match' was struck, deftly and without noise,
and a big puff of smoke was sent circling above his head.

'Bah!' exclaimed Mrs. Rustic, turning away, 'if you've brought me here
just to see a Turkey man smoke a big pipe, Adam Camp, you may jest
take me home ag'in.'

A shout of laughter followed this sally, and as she turned away I
fancied that I saw a quick look exchanged between the man of the pipe
and our smug guide. Whether this were true or not, I observed that
Smug no longer seemed eager to hasten them onward, and I saw another
thing--the woman, in turning from the man of the souvenir matches, had
once more fixed her eye, through a sudden opening in the crowd, upon
myself; and immediately after she had whispered something in the ear
of her spouse, which something he soon after repeated, or so I
fancied, to his kind friend Smug.

I had followed them, trusting to the crowd and my skill as an 'artful
dodger,' up to this moment quite closely; but I now fell back, and
withdrew myself a little distance from the aisle where all three were
now loitering, the woman examining with wondering eyes marvellous
Turkish slippers with turned-up toes, and olive-wood beads and
bracelets, proffered by fierce Mohammedans in baggy trousers and
tasselled fez, or by swarthy, oily-skinned girls with bushy hair and
garments of Oriental colouring, or in tailor-made gowns, and with the
ubiquitous f