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Besides Sardi Babu and Mokarzel there had been Nicola Abbu, the confectioner; Menheem Shikrie, the ice-cream vendor; Habu Kahoots, the showman; and David Elias, a pedler. All six of them, as they claimed, had been sitting peacefully in Ghabryel & Assad's restaurant, eating kibbah arnabeiah and mamoul. Sardi had ordered sheesh kabab.

Kabab is meat roasted or fried with spices; sometimes in small pieces, sometimes minced, sometimes on skewers, but never in joints as with us, though they make kababs of a whole lamb or kid. It is used in a collective sense, like the term kisa, or "purse," among the Persians and Turks; only the kisa consists of five hundred dollars, a sum very nearly equal to 1000 rupis.

Another sort of kabáb for such is the name of the preparation is being made from a large wash-basin full of ready seasoned minced meat, small handfuls of which the jovial chef adroitly plasters on more skewers, cooking them like the others. Squatted on the ground by the side of this "bar" is a retailer of ripened native butter, "warranted five years old."

He called it the Homeric kabab, and claimed that it had been handed down from the days of the old Grecian writer and philosopher; which, if true, proved that Homer knew a delicious thing when he tasted it. It surely was a thing to conjure with.