But the eyes of the hungry boy soon turned back to the well-spread table, where they rested approvingly upon a remarkably good breakfast. There was a dish of pillav, made of a preparation of wheat called _bulghour_, with boiling butter poured over it, and upon the pillav a well-cooked fowl lay in state, as the best part of the banquet. There was queer-looking bread in large cakes thin as wafers, and folded together like napkins; there was a great copper vessel lined with something that looked like silver, and filled with _madzoun_, a kind of cold, sour, boiled milk, and there was a pitcher of tempting pink sherbet, with glasses to drink it from. Jack gave a little sigh of satisfaction, and ejaculated, "Wish father would come before the fowl gets cold." Grayson came, looking white and weary, a thing unusual with him. "Let us have our breakfast, father," Jack said. "I am sure you are starving,--I am." His exploits on the fowl went far to prove it. But his father gave him little assistance. "You don't eat, father," he said. "I am not hungry. Though the sun is up such a little while, it has contrived to give me a headache. I shall sleep it off. _You_ want a sleep too, as your eyes are crying out." "Not a bit of them, father. I could not sleep now; I want to go out and see this queer old place. I'll sleep all the better when I come back." "Well, do so; but take care of the sun, and get one of the servants to go with you. You will find them about somewhere." Grayson spoke with a dull, listless air, quite foreign to his brisk, energetic nature. "He is very sleepy," Jack thought, as he put on his protective head-dress, and ran cheerfully down into the court. He looked about for the servants, but could not see either of them. As he was standing there, an open door attracted his eye, and he could not help looking in. A woman was baking bread, in an oven consisting of a large round hole in the clay floor of the middle of the room. She was taking small pieces of dough from a lump beside her, slapping them on the inside of the oven, and promptly removing those already baked sufficiently. Two dark-eyed little boys were playing quietly at some game on the ground, and an older lad was standing beside her, talking, apparently about a bundle of cotton in a cloth which he held by the four corners. Raising her eyes for a moment from her oven and her dough, the woman saw the stranger at the door. He did not know a word of Armenian, nor she a word of English, but she saluted him with great courtesy, bowing almost to the ground; then, as she rose slowly, touching her heart, her lips, and her forehead. The children did the same; the youngest acting his little part so prettily that Jack fell in love with him on the spot. As the woman, by signs, invited him to enter, he did so, and the children placed a cushion for him in the corner farthest from the door. The older boy brought him sherbet, flavoured and tinted with rosewater.