about you; you are among rascals who have nothing to learn in the way of robbery.”

"They have not been at sea yet," mildly said Nachaman, as, with his hands folded on his breast, he walked away.

Yemen is the paradise of Arabia, and a hundred thousand poets have sung its praises, each copying the other, as is the custom, at least among the Arab poets; and each ready to live and die in the faith that all his predecessors knew nothing about the matter. Many millions of reeds were dipt in ink yearly upon the controversy; and more volumes were written than, fairly spread out, would paper the six provinces from Aden to Bassorah. But the Rabbi had not travelled above a league, when he began to think that he had formed a very hasty idea of Paradise. The sun all but burned through his turban. The sands were like fire reduced to very small particles, that scorched his feet through sandals and all. Myriads of flying plagues, to which the mosquitoes of the Panjaub were butterflies, fell furiously on his skin; and, so far as prospect was concerned, his view from the summit of the first range of stony hills only showed him what, but for his memory of the Arab poets, and his fear of the knives of their admirers, he would have at once declared to be nothing but an immense oven for baking the whole human race alive.

But Nachaman, though advanced in years, was sinewy and active. He was accustomed to travel ; and he felt, that after having sailed with the

Persian from Cape Comorin to the three plantains that wither over the coffee-house on the landingplace at Aden, he might scorn the troubles of the world. His way was solitary; and indeed in the first hundred yards after he left the gates of the town, he began to think that the sun and the soil together had done their duty, and broiled mankind out of the land. But he was not quite companionless, for he brought with him a little Indian monkey, which had escaped every attempt of the crew to catch and eat him; a nightingale given to him by the daughter of an Afghan prince, as a testimony to the land of her fathers; the Book of the Law; and the lamp by which he regularly read it, from nightfall until the first cock-crowing.

Day was rushing down, and the sun, like an expiring torch, was flashing up a fiercer flame, when Nachaman, desperately exhausted, halted beside a small stream that stole out of a crevice in the rock, but, like his own virtues, seemed to hate being observed, for it had scarcely trickled into the light when it sank again. But here was at least coolness; and the companions of his journey exhibited such a liking to the spot, that the mild Rabbi sat down, and, before tasting the rill, returned thanks according to the manner of his people. The nightingale gratefully flapped his little dusty wings, and began a song without waiting for the moon; and the monkey, tired to death, and thankful for his cup of water, rubbed his head against his master's beard, and fell asleep in his lap. The world thus quiet

around him, the learned Rabbi lighted his lamp, and began to read.

But his studies were soon interrupted by the noise of many human feet crashing through the pebbles: he looked up, saw a single, strange-looking man gazing at him, and, before he had time to recover his presence of mind, saw the stranger gather his lips, and with a strong puff blow out the lamp. The night was pitch-dark; and Nachaman, though thoroughly alarmed at the neighbourhood of such a figure, dared not stir, where the next step might be down a precipice. But the sound of the feet gradually died away, and in half an hour the moon was broad as a shield of silver. Silence and solitude were around him, in the loveliness of an Eastern night. The monkey sprang forward in the light, bounding among the rocks; the nightingale perched on his shoulder, and began a wild prelude, sweeter than a thousand flutes; and, with his little guide and his little musician, the Rabbi, refreshed and cheered, marched up the mountain's side.

Another day of travel succeeded, long, breezeless, and burning: the very soul of Nachaman was scorched within him, and he envied the fishes, even though they were destined to pass their lives at sea. "But then," said he, "they are not forced to pass them in ships, which alters the case prodigiously; and, at all events, they need never see the sun but when they like it."

But, as the evening fell, he saw a solitary date tree, and hastened towards its shelter. To his in

finite surprise he found, gravely sitting under its branches, the very same personage who had blown out his lamp the night before. But the Rabbi was a slow-thoughted Oriental, and he did not feel that brilliant rapidity of genius which in Europe decides a character by a single action. "He blew out my lamp," said he; "but am I thence to conclude that he intended to knock out my brains?"

They entered into conversation, ate dates together, and were on the point of becoming the best friends in the world; when the Rabbi accidentally alluding to the magnificence of the tree that hung its broad canopy over their heads, said that "it was about the size of the tree that Adam and Eve were married under in Eden."

The Stranger shot a glance from one of the blackest eyes that ever looked into a rabbi's face, and laughing, merely answered, "Poh! trash from that wisest of blockheads, Rabbi Joshuah Ben Levi. So; you read the Cholin?"

Nachaman did not care the dust of his sandal for Rabbi Joshuah Ben Levi, whom he knew to be a blockhead of the first water; but no man likes to have the truth thrust down his oesophagus. He was stung too by the smile with which the fact was accompanied, and, like other doctors of supreme science, he indulged his vexation under cover of his zeal.

He argued hotly, but he argued in vain. At last, losing the balance of his temper, and determined to silence his provoking antagonist at a word, he turned

on him, and asked whether he "did not believe that the pen of the Rabbi Tanchuma was guided by the angel Gabriel from morning till sunset, and by the angel Raphael from sunset till morning?"

"Not one word," was the Stranger's answer; "I hope the angels were better employed than to have any thing to do with that most consummate of asses."

Nachaman almost fell off his seat with surprise. "What, then!" at last he scarcely recovered strength to say, "I suppose you don't believe that the Mishna is the finest work of the human mind?" "Not a syllable.”

"Nor that the Gemara is the most illustrious, profound, and eloquent of all commentaries ?" "Nonsense from beginning to end."

Nachaman was the least irritable Rabbi that ever walked the earth, but he had been an author, was bred in a college, and had spent ten of his best years in the unremitting study of the doctors. He started upon his feet in an indignation that half choked him. But to give the scoffer a last chance, he haughtily asked, "What he thought of the Talmud?',

The Stranger, without changing a muscle at the writhing features and formidable frown of the Rabbi, answered, "A fragment of bread flung in a province of sand- -a naked babe in an Arabian desert-a bushel of wheat floating in an ocean of barrenness --a grain of truth buried under ten thousand tons of imposture."

Nachaman was horror-struck: he involuntarily