’Halte la!

’My foaming bay was reined in with a strong hand, I leaped from the saddle, and found the sais at hand to hold our horses, while we saw the seventh heaven of the Koran, and by no means al Hotama.

’With a foresight indicating an old campaigner, the officer produced a couple of bottles of sherry from the capacious folds of the sais’ mantle, and unlocking the door of the house in front of which we stood, invited me to enter.  Two or three turns, a court-yard full of rose-bushes, and an enormous palm-tree, a fountain shooting up its sparkling waters in the moonlight, a clapping of hands, chibouks, sherry cooled in the fountain.

’Then, in the moonlight, the gleam of white flowing garments, the nervous thrill breathed in from perfumes filling the evening air; the great swimming eyes; the kiss; the ah!—­other bottles of sherry.  The fingans of coffee, the pipe of Latakiah tobacco, the blowing a cloud into dreamland, while Fatima or Zoe insists on taking a puff with you.

’But as she said, ’Hathih al-kissah moaththirah, which, in the vernacular, is.  ‘This history is affecting,’ so let us pass it by.  We finished those two bottles of sherry, and if Mohammed, in his majesty, refuses admittance to two Peris into paradise, because they drank sherry that night, let the sins be on our shoulders, WE are to blame.

* * * * *

’Next morning, at seven o’clock, I was at the banker’s, and received his orders, and at six o’clock that evening was steaming out of Alexandria, bound to Naples via Malta.  A little over twenty-four hours, and I had SEEN THE ORIENT THROUGH SHERRY—­pale, golden, and serenely beautiful!

‘Pass the punch.’

* * * * *

Very welcome is our pleasant contributor—­he who of late discoursed on ‘honeyed thefts’ and rural religious discipline—­and now, in the present letter, he gives us his views on meals, feeds, banquets, symposia, or by whatever name the reader may choose to designate assemblies for the purpose of eating.

Please make room at this table, right here, for me.  Surely at a table of such dimensions, there should be plenty of room.  Many a table-scene do I now recall, in days gone by, ’all of which I saw, and part of which I was,’ but nothing like this.  Tables of all sorts and sizes, but never a CONTINENTAL table before.  I suppose the nearest approach to it was the picnic dinner the wee youngsters used to eat off the ground!  A CONTINENTAL table!  The most hospitable idea imaginable.  Give place!  Do you demand my credentials, my card, my ticket?  Here we have it all; a little note from mine host, Mr. LELAND, inviting the bearer to this monthly repast, and requesting, very properly—­it was the way we always did, when we used to get up picnics—­that the receiver of the note bring some sort of refreshments