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The highest grade of all is the "sherbutli," also gaily dressed, who from an enormous green glass bottle, brass mounted, and cooled by a large lump of ice held in a cradle at the neck, dispenses sherbet, lemonade, or other cooling drink. Each of these classes of water-seller is well patronized, for Egypt is a thirsty land.
Here a water-seller, laden with his goatskin vessel, tinkled his little bell; there an orange-hawker, balancing a basket of the golden fruit upon his ragged turban, bawled his wares.
Thou wert born my vassal, Gino Monaldi; and though trained from boyhood in this occupation of a gondolier, thou art properly a being of my fiefs in Napoli." "St. Gennaro make me grateful for the honor, Signore! But there is not a water-seller in the streets of Venice, nor a mariner on her canals, who does not wish this Jacopo anywhere but in the bosom of Abraham.
On the whole there is a great lack of the picturesque in the Tripoli streets, and also of noise. The street cries are poor, being chiefly those of vegetable hawkers, and one misses the striking figure of the water-seller, with his tinkling bell and his cry. The houses and shops are much like those of Morocco, so far as exteriors go, and so are the interiors of houses occupied by Europeans.
They conjure up a vision in my mind of an absent-minded water-seller, bearing his precious jars and crying his wares knee-deep, and going deeper into a rising stream.
"Cheaper than Mistress Stowe's sack, at any rate, if not so palatable," said Johnnie. He gave the lad a farthing and took the Holy Well pannikin, whilst his companion drained that which owned its virtues to the sanctity of St. Clement, whose church fronted them across the way. As neither tasted of both, they had, like the water-seller, no opinion as to the merits of the rival wells.
You meet the water-seller passing down the street with his barrel cart, drawn by three or four horses with tinkling bells, dispensing water to customers at five cents a pail. The poorer classes have no other means of procuring this precious liquid. The water is kept in a corner of the house in large sun-baked jars.
The cry of a water-seller or the occasional jingle of a spur came from the street below, but these, too, were familiar sounds, and they were no longer regarded. The room contained but little furniture and the door was of heavy oak. Its whole aspect indicated that it was a prison. The man was of middle years, and his face showed a singular blend of kindness and firmness.
There stood the sentry, indifferent to that which had no interest for him; the cock that had moulted its tail still scratched in the dirt; the crested hoopoe still sat spreading its wings on the head of one of the two great statues of Rameses which watched the gate; a water-seller in the distance still cried his wares, but the stranger was gone.
One heard too distinctly the tinkling mule-bells, the heavy steps in the dust of the band of singers whom Cardailhac was placing at regular distances in the seething human hedge which bordered the road and was lost in the distance; a sudden call, children's voices, and the cry of the water-seller, that necessary accompaniment of all open-air festivals in the Midi.
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