An replied, "The stranger is a prince, we take it, in his own country,
and princes fare not quite like common people, even here."

"So," I said, my mouth full of a strange, unknown fish, and a cake soft
as milk and white as cotton in the pod. "Now that makes me feel at home!"

"Would you have had it otherwise with us?"

"No! now I come to think of it, it is most natural things should be much
alike in all the corners of the universe; the splendid simplicity that
rules the spheres, works much the same, no doubt, upon one side of the sun
as upon the other. Yet, somehow--you can hardly wonder at it--yesterday
I looked to find your world, when I realised where I had tumbled to,
a world of djin and giants; of mad possibilities over realised, and here
I see you dwellers by the utterly remote little more marvellous than if
I had come amongst you on the introduction of a cheap tourist ticket,
and round some neglected corner of my own distant world!"

"I hardly follow your meaning, sir."

"No, no, of course you cannot. I was forgetting you did not know! There,
pass me the stuff on yonder platter that looks like caked mud from an
anchor fluke, and swells like breath of paradise, and let me question
you;" and while I sat and drank with that yellow servitor sitting in
front of me, I plied her with questions, just as a baby might who had
come into the world with a full-blown gift of speech. But though she
was ready and willing enough to answer, and laughed gaily at my quaint
ignorance of simple things, yet there was little water in the well.