n by rough disdainful stewards; and made to pay for a
leathery gobbet of beef and a slice of black flint-like bread: all
this we know. But that New World paradise is well worth these passing
privations.

The second day at sea, when the two Baalbekian lads are snug on deck,
their rugs spread out not far from the stalls in which Syrian cattle
are shipped to Egypt and Arab horses to Europe or America, they
rummage in their bags--and behold, a treat! Shakib takes out his
favourite poet Al-Mutanabbi, and Khalid, his favourite bottle, the
choicest of the Ksarah distillery of the Jesuits. For this whilom
donkey-boy will begin by drinking the wine of these good Fathers and
then their--blood! His lute is also with him; and he will continue to
practise the few lessons which the bulbuls of the poplar groves have
taught him. No, he cares not for books. And so, he uncorks the bottle,
hands it to Shakib his senior, then takes a nip himself, and,
thrumming his lute strings, trolls a few doleful pieces of Arabic
song. "In these," he would say to Shakib, pointing to the bottle and
the lute, "is real poetry, and not in that book with which you would
kill me." And Shakib, in stingless sarcasm, would insist that the
music in Al-Mutanabbi's lines is just a little more musical than
Khalid's thrumming. They quarrel about this. And in justice to both,
we give the following from the _Histoire Intime_.

"When we left our native land," Shakib writes, "my literary bent was
not shared in the least by Khalid. I had gone through the higher
studies which, in our hedge-schools and clerical institutions, do not
reach a very remarkable height. Enough of French to understand the
authors tabooed by our Jesuit professors,--the Voltaires, the
Rousseaus, the Diderots; enough of Arabic to enable one to parse and
analyse the verse of Al-Mutanabbi; enough of Church History to show
us, not how the Church wielded the sword of persecution, but how she
was persecuted herself by the pagans and barbarians of the earth;--of
these and such like consists the edifying curriculum. Now, of this
high phase of education, Khalid was thoroughly immune. But his
intuitive sagacity was often remarkable, and his humour, sweet and
pathetic. Once when I was reading aloud some of the Homeric effusions
of Al-Mutanabbi, he said to me, as he was playing his lute, 'In the
heart of this,' pointing to the lute, 'and in the heart of me, there
be more poetry than in that book with which you