The luncheon was very much the same as one would get at Sherry's or Claridge's or the Café de Paris, except that for our special benefit a few native dishes with strange names and still stranger flavours had been added to the menu. The wines were irreproachable and the Hodeidah coffee and Aleppo cigarettes could have been had nowhere west of Suez. My eye was caught by the magnificence of the jewel-monogrammed cigarette-case which the Sultan constantly passed to me, and I ventured to comment on it admiringly. “Do you like it?” said he, with a pleased smile. “It is only a trifle that I picked up last spring in Paris. Accept it from me as a little souvenir of your visit to Zanzibar—really—please do.” Quite naturally I hesitated, as who would not at accepting offhand a thing worth a couple of thousand rupees. The Sultan looked disappointed. “It is not worthy of you,” he remarked. “Some day I shall send you something more fitting,” and he put it back in his pocket. All the rest of my stay in Zanzibar I kept thinking how near I came to getting that magnificent case, and what a story it would have made to tell at dinner tables over the camembert and coffee; and it almost spoiled my visit. As I was leaving the palace the military secretary inquired: “Why on earth didn't you take the cigarette case when the Sultan offered it?” “Polite hesitation,” I replied. “I was going to accept it in just a minute.” “In the East you should accept first and hesitate afterward,” he answered. After luncheon I played billiards with the Sultan. He is a good player, and it was no trouble at all to let royalty win gracefully. The conversation turned on America. It seemed that the two Americans whom his Highness most admired were Theodore Roosevelt and John Philip Sousa; the one because he had visited Africa and proved himself a real _shikari_; the other because he had immortalised the Sultan's dominions in his _A Typical Tune of Zanzibar_. (It happened that a month or so later I dined with Mr. Sousa in Johannesburg and told him this incident, whereupon he offered to send the Sultan an autographed copy of _El Capitan_. If he has forgotten to do it, this will serve to remind him that the Sultan's address is still “The Palace, Zanzibar.”) Incidentally his Highness mentioned that he was about to be married. Later on the English secretary supplemented this by explaining that his latest bride—he already had three wives—was the fifteen-year-old daughter of a well-to-do merchant in the bazaars, with whom the Sultan had been haggling regarding the price to be paid for the girl for a year or more. After a time we strolled out on the breeze-swept veranda. As I leaned over the railing I noticed something sticking up out of the harbour and I pointed to it. “What is that, your Highness?” I inquired. “A wreck,” he answered shortly. “A wreck! A wreck of what?” I persisted. “The wreck of the Zanzibar navy,” he said, turning