Stamboul Nights
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: MORTMAIN THE building of the chapel on the Hill of the Arrow Makers was for Mr. Bisbee, the Reverend Horatio Bisbee, who had that matter in charge, an abounding means of grace. At the time, to be sure, he thought it the very devil?although he was not the man to say so. But in after years the structure stood for him as a monument to many things that might have remained sealed to him had he stayed happily at home in Iowa. And it even became his to arrive at the somewhat rare realization that it is well for a man to be able to say of himself: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio. ..." The first of them was the Pasha to whom the ground belonged. He lived in a tumbledown konak with nothing but divine providence and three thin props to keep him from sliding into the street, and he ought to have be
...en delighted to get rid of such a draughty rambling old fire- trap for nothing. Whereas he pretended thathe loved every unpainted board on the place, where his fathers had lived ever since the Conquest and where his sons should have lived after him, if? That if was the measure of his unreasonableness. For he also pretended that everything had been spoiled for him by these uncircumcised barbarians who had come and planted their infernal printing presses at his ear. How could you take a nap between meals, how could you sip a coffee in peace, how could you look after your rose-bushes?janim!? when your light was darkened by a vast pest- house in which the Christians were already tasting their portion of the world to come, and which resounded from noon to noon as with the torments of the damned? And then they said they merely wished to do good! Let them therefore pay the Pasha's price. They did, with much grumbling, being more anxious for his konak than his company. Only it w...
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