"Why don't you go and scold the Padishah?" she said on one occasion; "she thinks the same as I do about these things, only she cannot talk Turkish, so she does not say them."
"The Padishah is but a child," he answered; "it would hurt her. It would be a shame to hurt a child."
As a matter of fact I was older than X in months, but her bodily proportions were larger than mine, and everything goes by size in the East.
As time went on, however, we too had our little rubs, and his methods of making friends again were what one would expect from his schoolboy nature. If I was in the tent, he would throw stones at it until I looked out smiling; this was taken as a sign that the quarrel was over; he would roll up an extra large cigarette for me, and we would sit on the ground and have a smoke of peace together. Our friendship was of a silent nature. I made my fifty words express everything I had to say, and to simplify matters only used the verbs in the infinitive and nouns in the nominative. Long custom had established a certain meaning to various sentences between us which would have been unintelligible to any other Turk.
"What Turkish, aman, what Turkish she speaks!" he used to say to X, holding up his hands in amused dismay.
We taught him a few English sentences, of which he was very proud.
"Pull it up," he invariably said when he held out his hand to help us off the ground.
"Pull it down," was his formula when he arranged our habit skirts after mounting us.
"Pull it off," when he helped us off with our oats.
When he was in a temper I made him say, "I am a silly man," which he pronounced:
Although he did not know the meaning of the words, he connected them with his own misdemeanours.
"Silliman yok (not), silliman yok," he used to say fiercely when he was beginning to repent and get ashamed of himself. He always said "Good-bight" for "Goodbye," confusing it with "Good-night."
Great was his pleasure whenever in the course of our travels we came across a European, or any one who could speak a language which I understood.
"See now," he would exclaim at the unwonted sight of me talking with any one, "she has found a friend!" And then, when we parted and I relapsed into silence: "See now, how sad she looks! She is thinking of her friend."