k after this manner? What have I done? Speak, and speak truth!'

'Ah, Hajji, Hajji!' said my wife's uncle, shaking his head and grey
beard at the same time, 'you have been eating much abomination! Could
a man who has seen the world like you, suppose that others will eat it
with you, and say, thanks be to Allah! No, no--we may eat, but will not
digest your insolence.

'But what have I done, O my uncle?' said I to him; 'by my soul, speak!'

'What have you done?' said my wife's cousin. 'Is lying nothing? is
stealing nothing? is marrying a wife under false pretences nothing? You
must be a rare man without shame to call such acts nothing!'

'Perhaps,' said the eldest brother, 'you think it a great honour which
the son of an Ispahan barber confers upon one of the richest families of
Constantinople, when he marries their daughter!'

'And perhaps,' said the other, 'you may look upon a beggarly vender
of pipe-sticks in the light of a merchant, and think him worthy of any
alliance!'

'But Hajji, praise be to Allah! is a great merchant,' said the uncle
ironically: 'his silks and velvets are now on their way to bring us
lambskins from Bokhara; his shawls are travelling to us from Cashmere,
and his ships are blackening the surface of the seas between China and
Bassorah!'

'And his parentage,' continued his son in the same strain, 'a barber's
son did you say? forbid it, Allah! No, no; he dates from the Koreish. He
is not even the descendant, but, by the blessing of God, of the ancestry
of the Prophet; and who can come in competition with a Mansouri Arab?'

'What is all this?' again and again did I exclaim, as I saw the storm
gathering about my ears. 'If you want to kill me, do so; but do not pull
off my skin by inches.'

'I tell you what is it, man without faith,' said the stern man, who
hitherto had remained immovable; 'you are a wretch who deserves not
to live! and if you do not immediately give up all pretensions to your
wife, and leave this house and everything that belongs to it, without
a moment's delay, do you see those men' (pointing to the two ruffians
before mentioned); 'they will just make your soul take leave of your
body as easy as they would knock the tobacco out of their pipes. I have
spoken, and you are master to act as you please.'

Then the whole of the assembly, as if excited by this speech, unloosed
their tongues at once, and, without reserve of words or action, told me
a great number of disagreeable tr