However, various things went into my hopper first and last, to the tune of the mill-wheels in the valley--particularly last.... It was lucky for me that the wireless telegraphy I sometimes felt about me allowed the _Mudir_ to cultivate his natural inclinations. He was bored enough in his exile, and I think he was genuinely glad that his advices from headquarters made him free of my company. I certainly am. I have never come into just such relations with any of the officials here. He was a grave, mild, suave personage who might have made an excellent _Cadi_ of tradition if he had never heard of Paris. As it was, I'm afraid he took less thought for his peasants' troubles than of the extent to which they could be made to repay him for his own. He liked to practise his French on me as much as I liked to practise my Turkish on him, and on such occasions as I had the honor of squatting at his little round board, his knowledge of the Occident would manifest itself in an incredible profusion of spoons. I also discovered that he was by no means averse to sampling my modest cellar. He didn't care so much about being found out, though. They are tremendous prohibitionists, you know, and while the pashas have accepted champagne with their tight trousers, they're not so public about it. Just watch when you go to your first court dinner. A person of whom I thought more than the _Mudir_, and who interested me more as a type, was the _Imam_. A more kindly, honest, simple, delightful old man it has seldom been my luck to meet. He was a Turk of the old school, without an atom of Europe in his composition. I wish they were not getting so confoundedly rare. They are worth a million times more than these Johnnies who pick up the Roman alphabet and a few half-baked ideas about what we are pleased to call progress. I took daily lessons from him. He was a mighty theologian--made me read the Koran, and all that, and was much interested in what I had to tell him of our own beliefs. He used to make me ashamed of knowing so little about them. Before he got through with me, he taught me rather more than was in the bond, I fancy. I had always cherished a notion that because a Turk could have four wives, and didn't think much of my chances for the world to come, and was somewhat free in the use of antidotes to human life, his morality wasn't worth talking about. But I got something of an eye-opener on that point.