calling each other’s attention to my expression.  It is singular with what perfect faith and confidence these rude tribesmen accept any statement I choose to make, and how eagerly they seem to dwell on simple statements of facts that are known to every school-boy in Christendom.  I entertain them with my map, showing them the position of Stamboul, Mecca, Erzeroum, and towns in their own Koordistan, which they recognize joyfully as I call them by name.  They are profoundly impressed at the " extent of my knowledge,” and some of the more deeply impressed stoop down and reverently kiss Stamboul and Mecca, as I point them out.  While thus pleasantly engaged, an aged sheikh comes to the tent and straightway begins “kicking up a blooming row” about me.  It seems that the others have been guilty of trespassing on the sheikh’s prerogative, in entertaining me themselves, instead of conducting me to his own tent.  After upbraiding them in unmeasured terms, he angrily orders several of the younger men to make themselves beautifully scarce forthwith.  The culprits — some of them abundantly able to throw the old fellow over their shoulders — instinctively obey; but they move off at a snail’s pace, with lowering brows, and muttering angry growls that betray fully their untamed, intractable dispositions.

A two-hours’ road experience among the constantly varying slopes of rolling hills, and then comes a fertile valley, abounding in villages, wheat-fields, orchards, and melon-gardens.  These days I find it incumbent on me to turn washer-woman occasionally, and, halting at the first little stream in this valley, I take upon myself the onerous duties of Wall Lung in Sacramento City, having for an interested and interesting audience two evil-looking kleptomaniacs, buffalo-herders dressed in next to nothing, who eye my garments drying on the bushes with lingering covetousness.  It is scarcely necessary to add that I watch them quite as interestingly myself; for, while I pity the scantiness of their wardrobe, I have nothing that I could possibly spare among mine.  A network of irrigating ditches, many of them overflowed, render this valley difficult to traverse with a bicycle, and I reach a large village about noon, myself and wheel plastered with mud, after traversing a, section where the normal condition is three inches of dust.

Bread and grapes are obtained here, a light, airy dinner, that is seasoned and made interesting by the unanimous worrying of the entire population.  Once I make a desperate effort to silence their clamorous importunities, and obtain a little quiet, by attempting to ride over impossible ground, and reap the well-merited reward of permitting my equanimity to be thus disturbed in the shape of a header and a slightly-bent handle-bar.  While I am eating, the gazing-stock of a wondering, commenting crowd, a respectably dressed man elbows his way through the compact mass of humans around me, and announces himself as having fought under Osman