oticed a curious flash of light from the white sands of the stream. He
pulled out a black stone having an eye of light reflecting all the hues
of the rainbow. He took the pebble into the house and put it on the
mantel which covers the central fires, and forgot all about it.

A few days later this same old priest came in to visit Ali Hafed's
successor, and the moment he opened that drawing-room door he saw that
flash of light on the mantel, and he rushed up to it, and shouted:
"Here is a diamond! Has Ali Hafed returned?" "Oh no, Ali Hafed has not
returned, and that is not a diamond. That is nothing but a stone we
found right out here in our own garden." "But," said the priest, "I
tell you I know a diamond when I see it. I know positively that is a
diamond."

Then together they rushed out into that old garden and stirred up
the white sands with their fingers, and lo! there came up other more
beautiful and valuable gems than the first. "Thus," said the guide
to me, and, friends, it is historically true, "was discovered the
diamond-mine of Golconda, the most magnificent diamond-mine in all the
history of mankind, excelling the Kimberly itself. The Kohinoor, and the
Orloff of the crown jewels of England and Russia, the largest on earth,
came from that mine."

When that old Arab guide told me the second chapter of his story, he
then took off his Turkish cap and swung it around in the air again to
get my attention to the moral. Those Arab guides have morals to their
stories, although they are not always moral. As he swung his hat, he
said to me, "Had Ali Hafed remained at home and dug in his own cellar,
or underneath his own wheat-fields, or in his own garden, instead of
wretchedness, starvation, and death by suicide in a strange land, he
would have had 'acres of diamonds.' For every acre of that old farm,
yes, every shovelful, afterward revealed gems which since have decorated
the crowns of monarchs."

When he had added the moral to his story I saw why he reserved it for
"his particular friends." But I did not tell him I could see it. It was
that mean old Arab's way of going around a thing like a lawyer, to
say indirectly what he did not dare say directly, that "in his private
opinion there was a certain young man then traveling down the Tigris
River that might better be at home in America." I did not tell him I
could see that, but I told him his story reminded me of one, and I told
it to him quick, and I think I will tel