No one ventures to occupy the cushioned divan alongside myself, although the divan is fifteen feet long, and it makes me feel uncomfortably like the dog in the manger to occupy its whole length alone.  In a farther corner, and off the slightly raised and carpeted floor on which are seated the guests, is a small brick fire-place, on which a charcoal fire is brightly burning, and here Mr. Vartarian’s private kahvay-jee is kept busily employed in brewing tiny cups of strong black coffee; another servant constantly visits the fire to ferret out pieces of glowing charcoal with small pipe-lighting tongs, with which he circulates among the guests, supplying a light to the various smokers of cigarettes.  A third youth is kept pretty tolerably busy performing the same office for Mr. Vartarian’s nargileh, for the gentleman is an inveterate smoker, and in all Turkey there can scarcely be another nargileh requiring so much tinkering with as his.  All the livelong evening something keeps getting wrong with that wretched pipe; mine host himself is continually rearranging the little pile of live coals on top of the dampened tobacco (the tobacco smoked in a nargileh is dampened, and live coals are placed on top), taking off the long coiled tube and blowing down it, or prying around in the tobacco receptacle with an awl-like instrument in his efforts to make it draw properly, but without making anything like a success; while his nargileh-boy is constantly hovering over it with a new supply of live coals.  “Job himself could scarcely have been possessed of more patience,” I think at first; but before the evening is over I come to the conclusion that my worthy host wouldn’t exchange that particular hubble-bubble with its everlasting contrariness for the most perfectly drawing nargileh in Turkey:  like certain devotees of the weed among ourselves, who never seem to be happier than when running a broom-straw down the stem of a pipe that chronically refuses to draw, so Kirkor-agha Vartarian finds his chief amusement in thus tinkering from one week’s end to another with his nargileh.  At the supper table mine host and his brother both lavish attentions upon me; knives and forks of course there are none, these things being seldom seen in Asia Minor, and to a cycler who has spent the day in pedalling against a stiff breeze, their absence is a matter of small moment.  I am ravenously hungry, and they both win my warmest esteem by transferring choice morsels from their own plates into mine with their fingers.  From what I know of strict haut ton Zaran etiquette, I think they should really pop these tid-bits in my mouth, and the reason they don’t do so is, perhaps, because I fail to open it in the customary haut ton manner; however, it is a distasteful thing to be always sticking up for one’s individual rights.  A pile of quilts and mattresses, three feet thick, and feather pillows galore are prepared for me to sleep on.  An attendant presents himself with a wonderful night-shirt, on the ample proportions