se? And paradise is for her who makes a follower of Moosa into a
follower of Mohammed. Let but the child die with the Kelmah on her
lips, and we are all three blest for ever--otherwise we will burn
everlastingly in the fires of Jehinnum." "But, alack! how can the poor
girl say the Kelmah, being as dumb as the grave?" "Then how can she say
the Shemang either?"

Having heard the verdict of the doctor, Ali returned in hot haste and
silenced both the bondwomen: "The Imam is a villain, and the Chacham is
a thief." There was only one good man left in Tetuan, and that was his
own Taleb, his schoolmaster, the same that had taught him the harp
in the days of the Governor's marriage. This person was an old negro,
bewrinkled by years, becrippled by ague, once stone deaf, and still
partially so, half blind, and reputed to be only half wise, a liberated
slave from the Sahara, just able to read the Koran and the Torah, and
willing to teach either impartially, according to his knowledge, for he
was neither a Jew nor a Muslim, but a little of both, as he used to say,
and not too much of either. For such a hybrid in a land of intolerance
there must have been no place save the dungeons of the Kasbah, but that
this good nondescript was a privileged pet of everybody. In his dark
cellar, down an alley by the side of the Grand Mosque in the Metamar,
he had sat from early morning until sunset, year in year out, through
thirty years on his rush-covered floor, among successive generations
of his boys; and as often as night fell he had gone hither and thither
among the sick and dying, carrying comfort of kind words, and often meat
and drink of his meagre substance.

Such was Ali's hero after Israel, and now, in Israel's absence and his
own great trouble, he tried away for him.

"Father," cried the lad, "does it not say in the good book that the
prayer of a righteous man availeth much?"

"It does, my son," said the Taleb "You have truth. What then?"

"Then if you will pray for Naomi she will recover," said Ali.

It was a sweet instance of simple faith. The old black Taleb dismissed
his scholars, closed down his shutter, locked it with a padlock, hobbled
to Naomi's bedside in his tattered white selham, looked down at her
through the big spectacles that sprawled over his broad black nose, and
then, while a dim mist floated between the spectacles and his eyes, and
a great lump rose at his throat to choke him, he fell to the floor and
prayed, a