They Were Always Courteous, However, And Were Never Backward In Offering Me The Youart, A Kind Of Whey, Which Is The Principal Delicacy To Be Found Amongst The Wandering Tribes.

Practically, I think, Childe Harold would have found it a dreadful bore to make "the Desert his dwelling-place,

" For at all events, if he adopted the life of the Arabs he would have tasted no solitude. The tents are partitioned, not so as to divide the Childe and the "fair spirit" who is his "minister" from the rest of the world, but so as to separate the twenty or thirty brown men that sit screaming in the one compartment from the fifty or sixty brown women and children that scream and squeak in the other. If you adopt the Arab life for the sake of seclusion you will be horribly disappointed, for you will find yourself in perpetual contact with a mass of hot fellow-creatures. It is true that all who are inmates of the same tent are related to each other, but I am not quite sure that that circumstance adds much to the charm of such a life. At all events, before you finally determine to become an Arab try a gentle experiment. Take one of those small, shabby houses in May Fair, and shut yourself up in it with forty or fifty shrill cousins for a couple of weeks in July.

In passing the Desert you will find your Arabs wanting to start and to rest at all sorts of odd times.

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