196 I GO A -FISHING. 



"I'm sure we have very comfortable quarters here," 

 said George, surveying my cosy salon with cool satisfac- 

 tion ; " nothing to complain of — wish I might always fall 

 as fair on my feet." 



" Precisely, my boy. But you won't feel as well when 

 you and Lucy and the two youngsters are crowded into 

 that next room, as you will be to-night ; for the rest of us 

 must manage with these diwans and the floor. We'll do 

 something better to-morrow, and you have all of you seen 

 worse quarters. Have you people dined ? Yes, of course. 

 Half starved when you arrived. Supper they call it here, 

 but I make it dinner. I must go and dress and get some- 

 thing to eat. How bright the lonesome room looks ! 

 John, go down and help me drink a bottle of Turken- 

 blud." 



It was not strange that all our talk that evening was of 

 the East and our old friends there, for John Steenburger 

 was a late arrival, and having passed three or four years, 

 at different dates, in Egypt and Syria and Asia Minor, 

 knew all the people that we knew, and could give us late 

 intelligence from them. I had missed him the last time I 

 was in the East ; and he had seen Cairo and crossed the 

 desert only a few months before his arrival. We yielded 

 to the spell of the Orient. John Steenburger had brought 

 it with him, and who could escape it ? He was but thirty 

 days from Damascus. The very cigarette he rolled as he 

 taiked was of tobacco from the mart of Latakia, where he 

 bought it, and the paper was some which he had picked 

 up in a shop at Athens the day he rested there on his 

 way across the isthmus to Corfu, and so up to Trieste. 



" No one of us has heard from you in months. Your 

 letters must have gone astray. How came you to cross 

 the desert acrain?" 



