One urchin, scarcely three years old, told me, because I objected to his perching upon my wounded foot, that his father had a sword at home with which he would cut my throat from ear to ear, suiting the action to the word.  By a few taunts, I made the little wretch furious with rage; he shook his infant fist at me, and then opening his enormous round black eyes to their utmost stretch, he looked at me, and licked his knee with portentous meaning.  Shaykh Hamid, happening to come in at the moment, stood aghast at the doorway, chin in hand, to see the Effendi subject to such indignity; and it was not without trouble that I saved the offender from summary nursery discipline.  Another scamp caught up one of my loaded pistols before I could snatch it out of his hand, and clapped it to his neighbour’s head; fortunately, it was on half-cock, and the trigger was stiff.  Then a serious and majestic boy about six years old, with an inkstand in his belt, in token of his receiving a literary education, seized my pipe and began to smoke it with huge puffs.  I ventured laughingly to institute a comparison between the length of his person and the pipe-stick, when he threw it upon the ground, and stared at me fixedly with flaming eyes and features distorted by anger.  The cause of this “bouldness” soon appeared.  The boys, instead of being well beaten, were scolded with fierce faces, a mode of punishment which only made them laugh.

They had their redeeming points, however; they were manly angry boys, who punched one another like Anglo-Saxons in the house, whilst abroad they were always

[p.294] fighting with sticks and stones.  And they examined our weapons,-before deigning to look at anything else,-as if eighteen instead of five had been the general age.

At last I so far broke through the laws of Arab politeness as to inform my host in plain words-how inconceivably wretched the boy Mohammed was thereby rendered!-that I was hungry, thirsty, and sleepy, and that I wanted to be alone before visiting the Harim.  The good-natured Shaykh, who was preparing to go out at once in order to pray before his father’s grave, immediately brought me breakfast; lighted a pipe, spread a bed, darkened the room, turned out the children, and left me to the society I most desired-my own.  I then overheard him summon his mother, wife, and other female relatives into the store-room, where his treasures had been carefully stowed away.  During the forenoon, in the presence of the visitors, one of Hamid’s uncles had urged him, half jocularly, to bring out the Sahharah.  The Shaykh did not care to do anything of the kind.  Every time a new box is opened in this part of the world, the owner’s generosity is appealed to by those whom a refusal offends, and he must allow himself to be plundered with the best possible grace.  Hamid therefore prudently suffered all to depart before exhibiting his spoils; which, to judge by the exclamations of delight which they elicited from feminine lips, proved highly satisfactory to those most concerned.