PROVERBIALLY WISE.
ACHMET sat in the bazaar, calmly smoking: he had said to himself in the early morning,—'When I shall have made a hundred piastres I will shut up shop for the day, and go home and take it easy, al'hamdu lillah!' Now a hundred piastres in the land of the faithful, where the sand is and the palms grow, is equal to a dollar in the land of Jonathan: and the expression he concluded his sentence with is equivalent to—Praise be to Allah!
Along came a blind fakir begging; then ACHMET gave him five paras, although his charity was unseen; neither did he want it to be seen, for he said to himself,—
'Do good and throw it into the sea—if the fishes don't know it, God will.'
And as he handed the poor blind fakir the small coin, he said to him, in a soothing voice,—
'Fa'keer' (which in the Arabic means poor fellow), 'the nest of a blind bird is made by Allah.'
Then along came SULIMAN BEY, who was high in office in the land of Egypt, and was wealthy, and powerful, and very much hated and feared. And ACHMET bowed down before him, and performed obeisance in the manner of the Turks, touching his own hand to his lips, his breast, his head:—and the SULIMAN BEY went proudly on. Then ACHMET smiled, and YUSEF, who had a stall in the bazaar opposite to him, winked to ACHMET, saying, in a low voice,—
'Kiss ardently the hands which you can not cut off:'—
and they smiled grimly one unto the other.
'Did you hear the music in the Esbekieh garden yesterday?' asked YUSEF of ACHMET. 'I think it was horrible.'