d: 'I care not for your prayers; give me money, and
I will give you fruit.'

"'But,' said the dervish, 'I am a beggar; I have never had money; I am
thirsty and weary, and one of your melons is all that I need.'

"'No,' said the gardener; 'go to the Nile and quench your thirst.'

"Thereupon the dervish, lifting his eyes toward heaven, made this
prayer: 'O Allah, thou who in the midst of the desert didst make the
fountain of Zem-Zem spring forth to satisfy the thirst of Ismail, father
of the faithful: wilt thou suffer one of thy creatures to perish thus of
thirst and fatigue? '

"And it came to pass that, hardly had the dervish spoken, when an
abundant dew descended upon him, quenching his thirst and refreshing him
even to the marrow of his bones.

"Now at the sight of this miracle the gardener knew that the dervish was
a holy man, beloved of Allah, and straightway offered him a melon.

"'Not so,' answered Hadji Abdul-Aziz; 'keep what thou hast, thou wicked
man. May thy melons become as hard as thy heart, and thy field as barren
as thy soul!'

"And straightway it came to pass that the melons were changed into
these blocks of stone, and the grass into this sand, and never since has
anything grown thereon."

In this story, and in myriads like it, we have a survival of that early
conception of the universe in which so many of the leading moral and
religious truths of the great sacred books of the world are imbedded.

All ancient sacred lore abounds in such mythical explanations of
remarkable appearances in nature, and these are most frequently prompted
by mountains, rocks, and boulders seemingly misplaced.

In India we have such typical examples among the Brahmans as the
mountain-peak which Durgu threw at Parvati; and among the Buddhists the
stone which Devadatti hurled at Buddha.

In Greece the Athenian, rejoicing in his belief that Athena guarded her
chosen people, found it hard to understand why the great rock Lycabettus
should be just too far from the Acropolis to be of use as an outwork;
but a myth was developed which explained all. According to this, Athena
had intended to make Lycabettus a defence for the Athenians, and she
was bringing it through the air from Pallene for that very purpose; but,
unfortunately, a raven met her and informed her of the wonderful birth
of Erichthonius, which so surprised the goddess that she dropped the
rock where it now stands.

So, too, a peculiar rock at Aegina was accoun