Page:Travels & discoveries in the Levant (1865) Vol. 1.djvu/117

Rh the Greek lady kept bringing coffee, and Turkish sweetmeats, and large tumblers of water, and slices of water-melon, and grapes, and pipes, to our hearts' content.

Still we wanted something more substantial, and expressed a wish for some supper. After about half an hour of this light skirmishing with water-melons and such things, the main body of the banquet was brought up. A sturdy cock, immolated for the illustrious strangers, appeared on a dish by himself —one leg unsubdued by the stewpan, stood out like a bowsprit,—a fatal sign of toughness; but the traveller who arrives in a Greek village after sunset, without previously announcing his arrival, must not hope to find meat fit to masticate. Then there was macaroni, salt-fish in a semi-cooked state, cheese made of goat's milk, more water-melons, more coffee, more pipes, more sweetmeats. We ate our way very philosophically through all this, more to please our host than ourselves, and then adjourned to two very comfortable beds.

A Greek bed is not such a troublesome, cumbersome thing to prepare as a European bed. The lady of the house simply opens a cupboard, takes out a mattress, a pair of sheets, and two yourgans or quilts, which she lays on a scrupulously clean floor. There is the bed all ready. The room needs no other preparations; for jugs and basins, such as we use, are unknown. Neither of these articles, or even a tooth-brush, is to be got for love or money in the town of Mytilene, though it has a direct trade with Europe.