Page:MacGrath--The luck of the Irish.djvu/191

 sundry snaps and curses from sleeping dogs and beggars. He had dropped his enemies down the horizon—a very comfortable feeling. In Smyrna he visited the dance-halls along the water-front. This, too, was barren of results, if you excepted an altercation over the price of the syrupy coffee. He was able to smooth out this difficulty by adopting the oldest-known method—he paid ten times too much.

It was in dusty, topas-tinted Cairo that he found the world he had been longing for, the world which had irresistibly drawn him out of the humdrum of drains and catch-basins. It was this strange, smelly, colorful Orient that his warm Irish soul was going to revel in, to memorize in detail.

The marvels of antiquity in Italy and Greece had scarcely scratched his soul, though he had not been impervious to the geographical beauties of these two countries. Besides, he knew Italians, Greeks, Bulgarians, Turks, and Russians. Burns, Dolan & Co. stood in the center of their bakeries, their shoe-shining parlors, their curio-shops, their tonsorial palaces, their candy and fruit stands; types so familiar that he had long ceased to pay any attention to them. But now he stood upon the enchanted shores of Aladdin's country (or near it). William had read an innocuous translation of the Arabian Nights, and he would not have been astonished to see the djinn pop out of soda-bottles. The splendid bronze men of North Africa, with their brown, drab, yellow, and blue burnooses, their brown and white and green