be to most men.

Fakredeen was fond of his debts; they were the source indeed of his only
real excitement, and he was grateful to them for their stirring powers.
The usurers of Syria are as adroit and callous as those of all other
countries, and possess no doubt all those repulsive qualities which are
the consequence of an habitual control over every generous emotion.
But, instead of viewing them with feelings of vengeance or abhorrence,
Fakredeen studied them unceasingly with a fine and profound
investigation, and found in their society a deep psychological interest.
His own rapacious soul delighted to struggle with their rapine, and it
charmed him to baffle with his artifice their fraudulent dexterity. He
loved to enter their houses with his glittering eye and face radiant
with innocence, and, when things were at the very worst and they
remorseless, to succeed in circumventing them. In a certain sense, and
to a certain degree, they were all his victims. True, they had gorged
upon his rents and menaced his domains; but they had also advanced large
sums, and he had so involved one with another in their eager appetite to
prey upon his youth, and had so complicated the financial relations of
the Syrian coast in his own respect, that sometimes they tremblingly
calculated that the crash of Fakredeen must inevitably be the signal of
a general catastrophe.

Even usurers have their weak side; some are vain, some envious;
Fakredeen knew how to titillate their self-love, or when to give them
the opportunity of immolating a rival. Then it was, when he had baffled
and deluded them, or, with that fatal frankness of which he sometimes
blushingly boasted, had betrayed some sacred confidence that shook
the credit of the whole coast from Scanderoon to Gaza, and embroiled
individuals whose existence depended on their mutual goodwill, that,
laughing like one of the blue-eyed hyenas of his forests, he galloped
away to Canobia, and, calling for his nargileh, mused in chuckling
calculation over the prodigious sums he owed to them, formed whimsical
and airy projects for his quittance, or delighted himself by brooding
over the memory of some happy expedient or some daring feat of finance.

'What should I be without my debts?' he would sometimes exclaim; 'dear
companions of my life that never desert me! All my knowledge of human
nature is owing to them: it is in managing my affairs that I have
sounded the depths of the human heart, recognise