Colonel Alfred de Hamal suits me far better.

She whispered to me, after the play: "Isidore and Alfred de Hamal are both here!"

Occasionally one finds its way into a house in quest of frogs, lizards, musk-rats, or some other of the numerous malefactors that use our dwellings as cities of refuge from the avenger, and it is discovered by the Hamal behind a cupboard, or under a carpet.

A peacock reposing majestically in the arms of a patient hamal appeared at the front door, a souvenir for "his excellency.

"It is yours!" Scarcely had we returned, indeed, before another patient hamal knocked, lugging the hapless bird.

Gendarmes guarded us while we waitedwe who the night before had slept in a scarlet-lined tent!and gendarmes hung at our heels as we and three patient hamals with the baggage tramped ignominiously through Chanak Kale's ruined streets.

Turkish, English, and French soldiers, Turks in turbans and fezes, Turkish women wrapped up to the eyes in white or blue clothes; hamals or porters staggered past under weights which seemed to the boys stupendous; pachas and other dignitaries riding on gayly-trapped little horses; carriages, with three or four veiled figures inside and black guards standing on the steps, carried the ladies of one harem to visit those of another.

Now it was my painful duty to go every morning up to his office-room and see that peon had put fresh ink and everything ready and that the hamal had dusted properly.

Here, one of the gang (later identified as the man who had been known as John Robin Ross-Ellison, and who insisted that he was a Baluchi) declared that he had just murdered Mrs. Dearman in her drawing-room and made a full statementa statement found to be only too true, its details corroborated by a trembling hamal who had peeped and listened, as all Indian servants peep and listen.

[401] In the original there is a play on the words haml and hamal.