and, what is more, a clergyman--the
kind of man I had been taught to treat with some respect.

He said no more till we had finished supper, which consisted of
sardines and corned beef and sliced pineapple, tomatoes and
half-liquid butter out of tins, and some very stale European bread
which he had brought with him. Confronted with such mummy food, I
thought with longing of the good, fresh meal which I had left behind
me at the headman's house. He may have guessed my thoughts, for he
observed: 'I never touch their food. It is insanitary'--which I knew
to be exactly what they said of his.

The man who waited on us seemed to move in fear, and was addressed by
his employer very curtly.

After the supper there was tea, which, I confess, was welcome, and
then the missionary put me through a kind of catechism. Finding out
who I was, and that we had some friends in common, he frowned deeply.
He had heard of my existence in the land, it seemed.

'What are you doing here at all?' he asked severely. 'At your age you
should be at college or in training for some useful work.'

'I'm learning things,' I told him rather feebly.

His point of view, the point of view of all my countrymen, imposed
itself on me as I sat there before him, deeply conscious of my youth
and inexperience.

'What things?' he asked. And then his tongue was loosed. He gave me
his opinion of the people of the country, and particularly of my two
companions. He had summed them up at sight. They were two cunning
rogues, whose only object was to fleece me. He told me stories about
Englishmen who had been ruined in that very way through making friends
with natives whom they thought devoted to them. One story ended in a
horrid murder. He wanted me to have no more to do with them, and when
he saw I was attached to them, begged me earnestly to treat them
always as inferiors, to 'keep them in their place'; and this I
promised, coward-like, to do, although I knew that, in the way he
meant, it was not in me.

It seemed that he himself was travelling in these wild places in
search of an old Greek inscription, mention of which he had discovered
in some book. He half-persuaded me to bear him company.

'You are doing no good here, alone with such companions,' he said, as
I at last departed. 'Think over my advice to you. Go back to England.
Come with me for the next few days, and share my tents. Then come and
stay with me in Jerusalem, and we can talk things over.' Ther