me breakfast - hot bread and milk,
and fried flesh of something between mutton and venison. Their ways of cooking
and eating were European, though they had only a skewer for a fork, and a sort
of butcher's knife to cut with. The more I looked at everything in the house,
the more I was struck with its quasi-European character; and had the walls only
been pasted over with extracts from the Illustrated London News and Punch, I
could have almost fancied myself in a shepherd's hut upon my master's sheep-run.
And yet everything was slightly different. It was much the same with the birds
and flowers on the other side, as compared with the English ones. On my arrival
I had been pleased at noticing that nearly all the plants and birds were very
like common English ones; thus, there was a robin, and a lark, and a wren, and
daisies, and dandelions; not quite the same as the English, but still very like
them - quite like enough to be called by the same name; so now, here, the ways
of these two men, and the things they had in the house, were all very nearly the
same as in Europe. It was not at all like going to China or Japan, where
everything that one sees is strange. I was, indeed, at once struck with the
primitive character of their appliances, for they seemed to be some five or six
hundred years behind Europe in their inventions; but this is the case in many an
Italian village.
    All the time that I was eating my breakfast I kept speculating as to what
family of mankind they could belong to; and shortly there came an idea into my
head, which brought the blood into my cheeks with excitement as I thought of it.
Was it possible that they might be the lost ten tribes of Israel, of whom I had
heard both my grandfather and my father make mention as existing in an unknown
country, and awaiting a final return to Palestine? Was it possible that I might
have been designed by Providence as the instrument of their conversion? Oh, what
a thought was this! I laid down my skewer and gave them a hasty survey. There
was nothing of a Jewish type about them; their noses were distinctly Grecian,
and their lips, though full, were not Jewish.
    How could I settle this question? I knew neither Greek nor Hebrew, and even
if I should get to understand the language here spoken, I should be unable to
detect the roots of either of these tongues. I