BALKING THE BEAR.
THE "Alligator" had quitted the dock on a dull morning, when the August sun had been dimly visible through yellowish mist, and rain fell in a drizzling shower; but the evening sunset was glorious, and as the vessel steamed over the heaving waters of the Channel, rosy radiance fell on Albion's chalky cliffs, crimsoned the clouds, and made a pathway of light over the waves. The evening was one of calm beauty; there was now scarcely a breeze to waft slowly along the aërial islands which floated above.
The brothers again stood on the deck watching the changing aspect of the shore which they were quitting. After a brief silence, Robin began the conversation.
"I don't want to give all my hours to idleness during the voyage, though I have not, like you, Harold, made the eight feet square of our cabin into a floating library of commentaries, dictionaries, and grammars in languages living and dead."
"A soldier must have his weapons and the workman his tools," observed Harold.
"You are pretty well up in Urdu already, as you have kept up that language since childhood. Of course you need works in Persian and Hindi type. But I cannot understand why you burden yourself with big Arabic books—Koran, dictionary, and grammar—seeing that Arabia is not our field. It seems to me like a soldier of the Victorian era loading himself, in addition to modern weapons, with the cumbrous ones used at the time of the Conquest."
"Hardly so," said Harold, smiling. "You must remember that in India I shall be brought into contact with many Mahomedans, and that Arabic is the sacred language in which the Koran is written, which is used by all learned men, of whatever nation, who follow the False Prophet. What you look upon as a superannuated pike or battle-axe, is the weapon now, as it has ever been, of educated Mahomedans, whether met with in Palestine, India, Africa, Arabia, or Persia. Arabic holds the same place with Orientals that Hebrew and Greek do with us."
"My stupid head never took in much Greek," observed Robin, "and of Hebrew I knew not a letter. I left all that learning to you. I don't believe that I should ever manage Arabic."
"You are very quick—much quicker than myself—in acquiring language colloquially," said Harold. "In our Continental tour, you put me to shame with your French; I might have something packed in my brain, but yours was always at the end of your fingers."
"Oh! That's a different thing," cried Robin, amongst whose failings vanity was not to be reckoned. "One can't help drawing in air when it's all around, one learns to drink it as children drink, and to jabber a language even as they do. But learning from big books is to me like pulling up water from a very deep well; mine is too small a bucket," added Robin, tapping his own forehead, "it holds little, and goes swinging about, dropping its contents before ever it reaches the top. Do what you will, you can't make me into an Arabic grammar, or a walking encyclopedia."