He came one morning to breakfast with us, bringing with him Padre Alessio,
a teacher in the Armenian College in the city. As for the latter, it was
not without a certain shock that I heard Mesopotamia mentioned as his
birthplace, having somehow in childhood learned to regard that formidable
name as little better than a kind of profane swearing. But I soon came to
know Padre Alessio apart from his birthplace, and to find him very
interesting as a scholar and an artist. He threw a little grace of poetry
around our simple feast, by repeating some Armenian verses,--grace all the
more ethereal from our entire ignorance of what the verses meant. Our
breakfast-table talk wrought to friendship the acquaintance made some time
before, and the next morning we received the photograph of Padre Giacomo,
and the compliments of the Orient, in a heaped basket of ripe and luscious
figs from the garden of the Convent San Lazzaro. When, in turn, we went to
visit him at the convent, we had experience of a more curious oriental
hospitality. Refreshments were offered to us as to friends, and we lunched
fairily upon little dishes of rose leaves, delicately preserved, with all
their fragrance, in a "lucent sirup." It seemed that this was a common
conserve in the East; but we could hardly divest ourselves of the notion
of sacrilege, as we thus fed upon the very most luxurious sweetness and
perfume of the soul of summer. Pleasant talk accompanied the dainty
repast,--Padre Giacomo recounting for us some of his adventures with the
people whom he had to show about the convent, and of whom many were
disappointed at not finding a gallery or museum, and went away in extreme
disgust; and relating with a sly, sarcastic relish that blent curiously
with his sweetness and gentleness of spirit, how some English people once
came with the notion that Lord Byron was an Armenian; how an unhappy
French gentleman, who had been robbed in Southern Italy, would not be
parted a moment from a huge bludgeon which he carried in his hand, and
(probably disordered by his troubles) could hardly be persuaded from