“Why,” cried the youth in admiration, “he never has to do anything but rest in his seat all day and put up his shutters and go home at night! Would you not like to own a shop and never have to work again all the days of your life?”
My answer that the dénouement of such a fate would probably be the sighing of willows over a premature grave was lost upon him.
An unprecedented throng was gathered in the café when I reached it in the evening. The proprietor danced blindly about the room, well nigh frantic from an ambitious but vain endeavor to serve all comers. “Hamlet,” done with his day’s fishing and his sea-going rags, was again on hand to give unconscious entertainment. The village scribe, if the bursts of laughter were as unforced as they seemed, had brought with him a stock of witty tales less threadbare than those of the night before; and the expression on the face of my guide, and his repeated refusals to interpret them, suggested that the stories were not of the jeune fille order.
The village carpenter was the leader of the opposition against my departure on foot, and finding that his pantomime had not aroused in me a becoming dread of the Bedouin-infected wilderness, he set out on a new tack. A coasting steamer was due in a few days. He proposed that the assembled Tyreans take up a collection to pay my passage to the next port, and set the ball rolling by dropping a bishleek into his empty coffee cup. A steady flow of metleeks had already set in before my protests grew vociferous enough to check it. Why I should refuse to accept whatever they proposed to give was something very few of these simple fellows could understand. The carpenter wiped out all my arguments in the ensuing debate by summing up with that incontestable postulate of the Arab: “Sir,” he cried, by interpreter, appealing to the others for confirmation, “if you go to Acre on foot, you will get tired!”
I slept again on the rush mat. My guide and his uncle accompanied me through the city gate next morning, still entreating me to reconsider my rash decision. The older man gave up just outside the village and with an “Allah m’akum’” (the Lord be with you) hurried back, as if the unwonted experience of getting out of sight of his workshop had filled him with unconquerable terror. The youth halted beyond the wind-blown neck of sand, and, after entreating me to send for him as soon as I returned to America, fled after his uncle. From this distance the gloomy huddle of kennels behind recalled even more readily than a closer view those lines of the wandering bard:
“Dim is her glory, gone her fame,
Her boasted wealth has fled.
On her proud rock, alas, her shame,
The fisher’s net is spread.
The tyrean harp has slumbered long,