suits. On his head was a little skull-cap, over his
body a robe of fine purple satin held with a girdle of twisted silk.

Near him sat an Indian scholar--on his dark head a full turban, and
about him richly-coloured robes. On the other side sat a little, thin,
copper-coloured Bengali dressed in white, and a British officer in his
scarlet and gold uniform, with his wife, who has told us the story of
that evening.

Not one of these brightly dressed people was, however, the strongest
power there. A man in black clothes was the real centre of the group.
Very slight in build, not tall, clean-shaven, with a high forehead
and sensitive lips, young Henry Martyn seemed a stripling beside the
flaming Arab. Yet Sabat, with all his sound and fury, was no match for
the swift-witted, clear-brained young Englishman. Henry Martyn was a
chaplain in the army of the East India Company, which then ruled in
India.

He was the only one of those who were listening to Sabat who could
understand what he was saying. When Sabat had finished his story,
Martyn turned, and, in his clear, musical voice translated it from
the Persian into Latin mixed with Italian for Padre Julius Caesar,
into Hindustani for the Indian scholar, into Bengali for the Bengal
gentleman, and into English for the British officer and his wife.
Martyn could also talk to Sabat himself both in Arabic and in Persian.

As Martyn listened to the rolling sentences of Sabat, the Christian
Arab, he seemed to see the lands beyond India, away across the Khyber
Pass, where Sabat had travelled--Mesopotamia, Arabia, Persia.

Henry Martyn knew that in all those lands the people were Mohammedans.
He wanted one thing above everything else in the world: that was
to give them all the chance of doing what Sabat and Abdallah had
done--the chance of reading in their own languages the one book in the
world that could tell them that God was a Father--the book of letters
and of biographies that we call the New Testament.

_The Toil of Brain_

There was not in the world a copy of the New Testament in good
Persian. To make one Henry Martyn slaved hard, far into the hot,
sultry Indian nights, with scores of mosquitoes "pinging" round his
lamp and his head, grinding at his Persian grammar, so that he could
translate the life of Jesus Christ into that language.

Even while he was listening to Sabat's story in the bungalow at
Cawnpore, Martyn knew that he was so ill that he could not live for
m