"What petition shall I make?" He is a youth of twenty or thereabouts, married to a young person of twelve or thirteen who stays with his mother. The society of neither of these ladies seems to interest him too intensely. He prefers to live in the stable with the other boys and the calf; he also loves to harden the mouth of the sah'b's horse; and when the time comes to work in the garden is he most in his element. We finally had to hide from him a pruning-knife we had obtained from abroad, so vastly did he prefer that toy to a dish-rag or a duster. I can't say that I blame him. He is much slower and stupider than is common in his quick witted seems race; but it takes a great deal to ruffle his temper, and the later we keep him up at night the better pleased he to be. He it was who during a period of interregnum spread the table for the sah'b's first bachelor dinner-party with one of the khanum's sheets, and not one of the best. Later in the evening, when Supplementary refreshments were served, I noticed that Habib had covered a tray with One of the discarded napkins of the dinner-table. It was not really dirty, he afterward explained, and it seemed a pity to risk spoiling a new lace doily! I discovered, though, that he was an excellent hand at decorating a dinner-table. Without any orders he Once picked a lot of hyacinths to pieces and traced with the single flowers so pretty a pattern on the table-cloth that I had n't the heart to affront him by changing it, though it was a little more feminine than I would have chosen for bachelors' hall. So does the genius of his race for design come out even in his humble fingers. On the whole I have learned more from him than he from me; as when he will politely take the store-room key in both hands, or ceremoniously call one aside in consultation, saying, "Without trouble, bring your honor here," or on state occasions serve tea on his knees. And he has given us strange glimpses of the world he lives in by speaking darkly of jinn in connection. with some one's illness, and by telling us, when a lost watch was found in the house, that he had burned candles for its recovery. The true head of the service is Mehmet Ali, the cook. Mehmet Ali was brought up as a butler, and an excellent one he is, though afflicted with a slight disfigure ment of the mouth and a stammering of the tongue. But a domestic crisis drove him into the kitchen, where he quickly learned to make pancakes and cakes much more complicated as well as he did sauces and curries for pilau, which really sounds more like pileu, if you will pronounce it in the Ital ian way. Consequently there are times when we are moved to call Mehmet Ali out of his kitchen and to say to him, with due ceremony, "Mehmet Ali, may your hand feel no pain." A white-capped chef or a darky Dinah might not know how to take so cryptic a pronouncement, but the black-hatted Mehmet Ali understands it for the highest possible compliment. And being no more than nineteen, though already old enough to have been married and divorced, he hides his blushes in a low bow, stammering in reply, "May honey be to your soul." The desire of Mehmet Ali's heart is to possess a wrist-watch. And he serves us with a credit that only seldom lapses for six tomans a month, which is a little less than six dollars. I am bound to add that Mehmet Ali would be less clever than he is if he did not make out of us considerably more than that. For, being cook, he does the marketing. I was astounded to find telephones in Hamadan, a convenience at that time strange to imperial Constantinople. But very few Hamadanis have one. We do not, for instance. Neither does any butcher, baker, or candlestick-maker with whom we deal. So there is no sitting comfortably at home and ordering what we want from the bazaar. Nor do people from the bazaar peddle their wares about the streets to any such degree as do the people of the Mediterranean. There is no such thing in Hamadan, either, as a delivery cart. The thing to do is to go to the bazaar in person every morning after breakfast, and Mehmet Ali is the person to do that thing-Mehmet Ali and his shagerd, or apprentice. This is the youngest member of our juvenile establishment, a round faced, bright-eyed, russet-colored muffin who totes Mehmet Ali's flexible market-basket, peels Mehmet Ali's pota toes, scours Meh- and Mehmet say that Mehmet Ali Going to the bazaar is evidently the great affair of the day. It is amazing how long it takes Mehmet Ali to bargain for the toasted wafers of bread or the scarcely thicker flaps of san gak which fill in the chinks between Mehmet Ali's own white loaves; for the eternal mutton of the country, for the frequent hare and partridge or francolin, for the famous melons of Ispahan, which taste to us like a flatter kind of squash; for the dubious bunches of grapes, which look fit only for the scavenger, but have merely begun to change into raisins and, as a matter of fact, are very good. Beef is far rarer than game, vegetables are neither varied nor appetizing unless they come out of our own garden, while such rarities as fish or strawberries are precious as pounded pearls and nightingales' tongues. Certain small fish, it is true, are indigenous to our neighborhood; but as the Persians catch them by the simple expedient of poisoning the water, and sometimes die afterward, we think twice before in dulging in them. Once in a while a runner brings to some member of our colony, from a river near Kirmanshahan or from the far-away Caspian, a real fish, which at once becomes the foundation of a state dinner-party. Mehmet Ali is so happy as to possess, in addition to his other attainments, the art of letters. He accordingly keeps strict tale of his purchases, rendering an account of them every day to the khanum. I have, however, to record a day of despair when the khanum temporarily shook off from her feet the dust of Hamadan, leaving the hapless Head of the Desert and the Prince. All Alone to shift for themselves. The Head of the Desert, being a man of affairs, therefore handed over the housekeeping to the very incompetent hands of the Prince All Alone. The beauty of this arrangement was that the Prince All Alone knew scarcely a word of Persian, despite Habib's flattering comment that his progress in it was so rapid as to crack the air! Nevertheless I gravely pretended to take Mehmet Ali's accounts. And when I could n't get it through my thick firengi head what Mehmet Ali was driving at, Mehmet Ali would draw little pictures in my account-book to illustrate his expenditures. Even then I sometimes hesitated between an egg and a turnip or a hen and a partridge. It was that latter fowl of calamity which at last ruffled our relations. The sah'b one day brought home some partridges. It so happened that Mehmet Ali also bought partridges that day; and, lo! the price of them was twice that of the sah'b's partridges. My vocabulary being too limited to do justice to the occasion, the sah'b took Mehmet Ali over. I don't know whether he called upon the washers of the dead to carry Mehmet Ali out, but he named Mehmet Ali the son of a burned father, and he cast in Mehmet Ali's teeth that last of all insults, "Mehmet Ali, you have no zeal." He also docked Mehmet Ali one toman of his pay, which Mehmet Ali took very much to heart. No cook in Hamadan, he stammered in wrath, bought more cheaply than he. It chanced that there was to be football that afternoon,-behold the AngloSaxon in foreign parts!-and after football the neighboring firengis were to come to us for tea. Cakes, therefore, were to be made, loaves baked, samovars lighted, china and silver set forth. When I hurried home at the end of the game to receive the hungry host, not a cake did I find, not a loaf, not even a single servant. Your Anglo-Saxon, however, is not so easily stumped. The firengis had their tea, if a little late and not quite so plenteous as we had planned. But the subtle Mehmet Ali, although failing to blacken our faces to the degree we hoped, after all made his point. He knew, and we knew, and each of us knew the other knew, that another cook capable of making both pilau and pancakes was not to be picked up in Hamadan-outside of some one else's kitchen. For the sake of the greater good, therefore, we that day learned the lesson of not insisting upon a lesser. And the next day Mehmet Ali treated us to quite the most magnificent chocolate-cake in his repertory. When we looked at it our mouths watered. When we tasted it we sent for Mehmet Ali. "Mehmet Ali," said the sah'b in all gravity, "may your hand feel no pain." "Sah'b," replied Mehmet Ali, "may honey be to your soul." Do you know, partridges grew a little cheaper after that! THE TEA-GARDEN Be generous, O my friend, and avail thyself of life Before they proclaim it as an event that such a person is not. -SADI: "The Flower-Garden." THE road and the river part company at the tip of the tea-garden. A sort of widening green island is there, between a crook of the stream and a wall of boulders that would not be Persian if it were perfectly straight. Yet the tall poplars of the garden would not be Persian if they were not planted in perfectly straight lines. Transversely or obliquely, however, the trees keep to one another no such relation as they might in the West. They stand very close together, making privacies between aisle and aisle. This is the quieter and roomier part of the tea-garden, where men come to enjoy the leisure of the East. A boy brings them a rug, a samovar, a jug of water, and some tiny tea-glasses, and there underneath the bough they sit hour after hour. They generally escape my prying eye, I notice, by eschewing the neighborhood of the wall. I do not blame them, for the road on the outer side of that low wall is fabu lously dusty. Who knows how many thousand years people have passed that way between the city and a certain happy valley in the mountain-Darius, Xerxes the Great, kings, the horsemen and peasants of to-day, strollers from afar, like Alexander of Macedon or me, jingling mules, dejected donkeys, flocks and herds that late in the afternoon or early in the morning move to and from the town, as it were in a pillar of cloud? The broken curve of the river-bank is a more popular part of the tea-garden, especially in the spring. Then is a short season when a chocolate-colored torrent foams past the place of poplars with an uproar that we in our far-away compound can hear across the open fields at night. As the snow recedes toward the top of the mountain, however, and as the mills and gardens at its foot need more and more water, the river becomes nothing but a gully of sand and boulders. But a trickle in the bottom of it seldom fails to make an illusion of coolness, even when coolness is most an illusion. The tall trees are able to add to the illusion, and the fields of wheat and poppy on the farther bank, where other poplars stroll at random with pollarded willows. I, too, like to stroll there of a late afternoon, admiring and envying the patrons of the tea-garden, who sit on their rugs along the edge of the river. What I most envy them is a certain cabinet particulier near the tea-house, carpeted with grass and inclosed by four walls of poplar-trees. Whether a special price is charged for this private room I do not know, but I have never seen more than one party in it at a time. They always remind me, those Persian tea-parties, of the gay little painted pictures which it is now so much the fashion for us firengis to collect. The guests do not wear quite such beautiful clothes, it is true. The Persians dress very soberly compared with un-Europeanized Turks, if with better taste and a truer sense of color. But the green of the teagarden, the dark lower purple and upper white of the mountain seen through its trees, the miraculous overarching blue, struments and of the voices that accompany them. Most of my readers, I fear, would be content to have it so. That music is of a school apart from ours. It moves within the briefest gamut of half, perhaps of quarter, tones, and characteristic of Persian singing is the yodeler's break into or out of falsetto. Most Westerners profess to hear in it nothing but a monotonous screech. But in the distance, or at dusk, across the rush of the river, there is for me something strangely disturbing in those high, endless, melancholy songs. The tea-house stands in the middle of the long, narrow tea-garden, neighborly to the road and the river. Like every other house in Persia, it is made of mud, cunningly shaped, whitened, and decorated out of all resemblance to its native element. On the ground floor, arcades give upon the garden. Above, open galleries survey the mountain and the river, the gardens at its foot, the flat-topped, tawny town, the hollow plain. Behind the tea-house a fountain splashes on a narrow terrace, which looks into the long aisles between the poplar-trees of which I have spoken. In front, approached by a hospitable gap in the wall of boulders, is a larger terrace. Much of it is paved with flag give the picture the characteristic Persian liveliness. Then my teadrinkers sit on the very rugs, in the very posture, of portraits by Behzad or Ustad Mohammed. About them are grouped the selfsame jugs and bowls, and sometimes they play the same quaint musical instruments. Wherein the miniatures of a museum fail in vividness is suggesting the sound of those in |