As the laws of the Medes and
Persians, so is the arrangement of the mattresses (_divans_) round the
walls inside a Moorish house.

A Moor does not spend his day indoors. He eats and sleeps at home, but is
otherwise sitting talking with his friends in the city, or in his shop,
or out at his garden-house or fields.

He eats in any one of the divanned rooms in which he happens to be at the
time, his rule being to "sleep where you will and eat where you will." A
slave carries in his dish of meat on a tray, and puts it on a table four
inches in front of the divan. Beef, mutton, and chicken are cooked in oil
till they fall apart and can be eaten with the fingers. He eats
vegetables and fruit, murmurs a "B`ism Allah" beforehand and a
"Hamdoollah" (God be praised) at the end; washes his hands; drinks green
tea, or begins his meal with it and bread of fine white flour. His wife
has the refusal of the dish after her lord, never eating with him; and
the slaves follow her. As many as five dishes may be brought up at a
meal; and the master of the house, sampling each, chooses which he will
eat, and sends the rest away. If he has a guest, it is the height of
politeness to select small pieces off the dish and put them within the
guest's reach, or, still better, into his mouth.

Moors, unless they are wealthy men, eat "by the eye"--that is, not
according to what they require, but according to that they see set before
them: frequent hiccups express gratification at hospitality received,
accompanied by "Hamdoollah." The amount which a Moor can eat is
prodigious. There was a man at Fez who was reverenced as a saint by his
neighbours, because he had been known to eat a hundredweight of
_coos-coosoo_ (porridge) and a whole sheep at a sitting.

Alarbi Abresha, Junior, meanwhile, took us on into his father's
guest-house, a suite of magnificent rooms, decorated in execrable taste,
the barbaric glories of the old Moorish style giving place to modern
French vulgarity. A courtyard house can be a strange mixture. Its
woodwork, possibly _arrar_, a cypress of beautiful grain, scented like
cedar, cinnamon-coloured, and immensely hard (out of which the Roman
patricians cut their precious tables, valued at their weight in gold if
as much as four feet wide: beams of arrar put into the Cordovo Mosque by
the Moors a thousand years ago still exist); its old silk hangings; its
tiles, kept polished like jet, and never desecrated by anything harder
than