d out that he was a liberated slave, who, ten years before,
had been brought from the Soos through the country of Sidi Hosain ben
Hashem, having been torn away from his wife, who was since dead, and
from his only child, who thus strangely rejoined him. This story he
told, in broken Arabic; to those that stood around, and, hard as were
the faces of the bidders, and brutal as was their trade; there was not
an eye among them all but was melted at his story.

Seeing this, Israel cried from the back of the crowd, "I will give
twenty dollars to buy him the girl's liberty," and straightway another
and another offered like sums for the same purpose until the amount of
the last bid had been reached, and the slave-master took it, and the
girl was free.

Then the poor negro, still holding his daughter by the hand, came to
Israel, with the tears dripping down his black cheeks, and said in his
broken way: "The blessing of Allah upon you, white brother, and if you
have a child of your own may you never lose her, but may Allah favour
her and let you keep her with you always!"

That blessing of the old black man was more than Israel could bear,
and, facing about before hearing the last of it, he turned down the
dark arcade that descends into the old town as into a vault, and having
crossed the markets, he came upon the second of the three sights that
were to smite out of his heart his pride towards God. A man in a blue
tunic girded with a red sash, and with a red cotton handkerchief tied
about his head, was driving a donkey laden with trunks of light trees
cut into short lengths to lie over its panniers. He was clearly a
Spanish woodseller and he had the weary, averted, and downcast look of
a race that is despised and kept under. His donkey was a bony creature,
with raw places on its flank and shoulders where its hide had been worn
by the friction of its burdens. He drove it slowly; crying "Arrah!" to
it in the tongue of its own country, and not beating it cruelly. At
the bottom of the arcade there was an open place where a foul ditch was
crossed by a rickety bridge. Coming to this the man hesitated a moment,
as if doubtful whether to drive his donkey over it or to make the beast
trudge through the water. Concluding to cross the bridge, he cried
"Arrah!" again, and drove the donkey forward with one blow of his stick.
But when the donkey was in the middle of it, the rotten thing gave way,
and the beast and its burden fell into the dit