proposes to fill our bare rooms with furniture, send us a servant and
cook, and charge us the same as if we lodged with him. The bargain is
closed at once, and he hurries off to make the arrangements. It is now
four o'clock, and the bracing air of the headland gives a terrible
appetite to those of us who, like me, have been sea-sick and fasting for
forty-eight hours. But there is no food within the Quarantine except a
patch of green wheat, and a well in the limestone rock. We two Americans
join company with our room-mate, an Alexandrian of Italian parentage, who
has come to Beyrout to be married, and make the tour of our territory.
There is a path along the cliffs overhanging the sea, with glorious views
of Lebanon, up to his snowy top, the pine-forests at his base, and the
long cape whereon the city lies at full length, reposing beside the waves.
The Mahommedans and Jews, in companies of ten (to save expense), are
lodged in the smaller dwellings, where they have already aroused millions
of fleas from their state of torpid expectancy. We return, and take a
survey of our companions in the pavilion: a French woman, with two ugly
and peevish children (one at the breast), in the next room, and three
French gentlemen in the other--a merchant, a young man with hair of
extraordinary length, and a _filateur_, or silk-manufacturer, middle-aged
and cynical. The first is a gentleman in every sense of the word, the
latter endurable, but the young Absalom is my aversion, I am subject to
involuntary likings and dislikings, for which I can give no reason, and
though the man may be in every way amiable, his presence is very
distasteful to me.

We take a pipe of consolation, but it only whets our appetites. We give up
our promenade, for exercise is still worse; and at last the sun goes down,
and yet no sign of dinner. Our pavilion becomes a Tower of Famine, and the
Italian recites Dante. Finally a strange face appears at the door. By
Apicius! it is a servant from the hotel, with iron bedsteads, camp-tables,