y a superhuman effort, had been forced down his shrunken gullet, his
enfeebled stomach refused to receive it, and violent spasms and vomiting
followed, which seemed to rend his stricken frame, as a fierce wind rips
through the palm-leaf sail of a native fishing-smack. In a day or two he
became wildly delirious, and Talib then witnessed a terrible sight. A
raving maniac in a well-ordered asylum, where padded walls and careful
tendance do much to save the poor disordered soul from tearing its way
through the frail casing of diseased flesh and bone, is a sight to
shudder at, not to see! But in the vile cage in which this poor victim
was confined, nothing prevented the maddened sufferer from doing himself
any injury that it is possible for a demented wretch to do. With the
strength of frenzy he dashed his head and body relentlessly against the
unyielding bars of the cage. He fell back crushed and bleeding, foaming
at the mouth with a bloody froth, and making inarticulate beast noises
in his throat. Then, as the madness again took hold of him, shaking him
as a terrier shakes a rat, he flung himself once more at the bars, and,
after another fearful paroxysm, fell back inert upon the floor. For
hours he lay exhausted, but wildly restless, too spent to struggle and
too demented and tortured to be still. He moaned, he groaned, he cursed
with horrid filthy words and phrases, bit as a dog bites in his madness,
strove to gnaw the loathsome rags which had long ceased to cover his
nakedness, and then again was still, save for the incessant rolling of
his restless head, and the wilder motion of his eyes which glistened and
flashed with fever. Just before dawn, when the chill air was making
itself felt even in the fetid atmosphere of the place, his reason came
back to him for a space, and he spoke to Talib in a thin, far-away
voice, and with many gasps and sighs and pauses:

'Little Brother,' he said, 'Dost thou also watch? For not long now
shall thy elder brother bear these pains. Hast thou any water? I
thirst sore. No matter, it is the fate to which I was born. Brother, I
stole five dollars from a Chief. I did it because my wife was very
fair, and she abused me, saying that I gave her neither ornaments nor
raiment. Brother, I was detected. I knew not then that it was my wife
who gave the knowledge of my theft to the Chief,--he in whose
household I was born and bred. He desired her, and she loved him, and
now he has taken her to wife,