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MY FIRST DINNER 51 curiously amongst our semi-barbarous surroundings. Our way to the dining-room lay through the open cloisters ; and faint odours of the East touched our nostrils as we passed. The dinner was the work of an excellent Scotch cook ; but it derived a charming and unmistak-able local flavour from the early vegetables and the woodcock, from the strong Cyprian wine, from the fine preserved apricots, and from the pale Oriental sweetmeats. The conversation, though very different from that of the afternoon tea-drinkers, was saturated, like theirs, with a local flavour also. Mr. Adam, as I will call the young professor, discussed, in a tone of placid academic refinement, which came to my ears like an echo of an Oxford common-room, the various spots where it might be desirable to excavate, and the various objects which had been unearthed already. Strange names of unknown places and people—men called Demetrius and Georgos, and places called Pa-raskévi and Morphou—buzzed in my ears like a sort of unintelligible spell. During dessert a basket was brought in full of prehistoric pottery, with a bronze spear-head in addition—the fruits, as I gathered, of that afternoon's work. Mrs. Adam, though, like Don Juan's mother, ' her favourite science was the mathe-matical,' betrayed in discussing these objects the fact that she was a Greek scholar. Colonel Falkland, who had lived much in the East, interwove with his talk about archœology many interesting observations as to the unsuspected power, the politics, and the E 2

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