For that matter, I don't imagine that I was precisely an open book myself. In this part of the world they haven't got our passion for poking around where we don't belong: perhaps they've had more time to find out how little there is in it. And for a mysterious individual from lands beyond the sea, whose servant can't be prevented from bragging of the splendor in which he lives at Constantinople, to bury himself in a wild country village, must mean something queer. Does one give up a _konak_ on the Bosphorus for a _khan_ in the Marmora? And are there no teachers of Turkish in Stamboul? I believe it didn't take long for the _Moutessarif_ of Nicomedia to find out I was there, and for him to ascertain in ways best known to himself what I was up to. I have often wondered what his version of it was. At all events it didn't prevent the great men of the village from smoking cigarettes of peace with me in a little vine-shaded coffee-house at the top of the hill. There was the _Mudir_, a plump and harmless _effendi_ of a governor; and the _Naïb_, who was some kind of country justice; and a charming old _Imam_ in a green turban and a white beard and a rose-colored robe; and a _Tchaouche_, an officer of police, all done up in yellow braid and brass whistles; and various other personages. And I couldn't imagine where in the world they had all picked up their courtliness and conversation. The _Mudir_ was from town, and one or two of the others had been there; but if such things were to be had for a visit to town they'd be a little more common at home. Of course, I was asked a good many questions, and some of them were pretty personal. That is a part of Oriental etiquette, you will find. It was marvelous, though, what a _savoir faire_ they had, to say nothing of a sense of life and a few other things. I couldn't make them out--taken with their vile village and their half-tamed fields. The thing used to bother me half to death, too. I thought all I had to do was to sit down and look pleasant and turn them inside out at my leisure. Whereas more than once I had a vague feeling, after it was over, of having been turned inside out myself. Altogether it makes me grin when I remember what an idiotic young ostrich I was. I have been at the business quite a while now, and to this day I am never sure of my man--how that Asiatic head of his will work in any given case. I can only console myself by remembering that I'm not the only one. In the last two generations I presume there must have been as many as four Anglo-Saxons--and three of those, Englishmen--who didn't more or less make jackasses of themselves when they ran up against Asia. And I fancy it took them rather more than a year to arrive at even that negative degree of comprehension.