"Yes, Yuleima. What has Serim to do with her? Well, I tell you. If she get away off go Serim's head. Listen! I speak something you never hear anywhere 'cept in Turk-man's land. I know it all--everything. I know her prince--he knows me. I meet him Damascus once--he told me some things then--the tears run his cheeks down like a baby's when he talk--and Serim know I know somethings! Ah! that's why he not believe me if he catch me talk to her. Afterward I find more out from my friend in Yuleima's house--he is the gardener. Put your head close, effendi." I drew my chair nearer and listened. "Yuleima," began Joe, "is one womans like no other womans in all--" But I shall not attempt the dragoman's halting, broken jargon interspersed with Italian and German words--it will grate on you as it grated on me. I will assume for the moment--and Joe would be most thankful to have me do so--that the learned Hornstog, the friend of kings and princes, is as fluent in English as he is in Turkish, Arabic, and Greek. It all began in a caique--or rather in two caiques. One was on its way to a little white house that nestles among the firs at the foot of the bare brown hill overlooking the village of Beicos. The other was bound for the Fountain Beautiful, where the women and their slaves take the air in the soft summer mornings. In the first caique, rowed by two caique-jis gorgeously dressed in fluffy trousers and blouses embroidered in gold, sat the daughter of the rich Bagdad merchant. In the second caique, cigarette in hand, lounged the nephew of the Khedive, Mahmoud Bey; scarce twenty, slight, oval face with full lips, hair black as sealskin and as soft, and eyes that smouldered under heavy lids. Four rowers in blue and silver attended his Highness, the amber-colored boat skimming the waters as a tropical bird skims a lagoon. The two had passed each other the week before on the day of the Selamlik (the Turkish holiday) while paddling up the Sweet Waters of Asia--a little brook running into the Bosphorus and deep enough for caiques to float, and every day since that blissful moment my lady had spent the morning under the wide-spreading plane-trees shading the Fountain Beautiful--the Chesmegazell--attended by her faithful slave Multif, her beautiful body stretched on a Damascus rug of priceless value, her eager eyes searching the blue waters of the Bosphorus.