" and he lay awake all
night.

Early in the morning he sought out the priest. I know by experience that
a priest is very cross when awakened early in the morning, and when he
shook that old priest out of his dreams, Ali Hafed said to him:

"Will you tell me where I can find diamonds?"

"Diamonds! What do you want with diamonds?" "Why, I wish to be immensely
rich." "Well, then, go along and find them. That is all you have to do;
go and find them, and then you have them." "But I don't know where to
go." "Well, if you will find a river that runs through white sands,
between high mountains, in those white sands you will always find
diamonds." "I don't believe there is any such river." "Oh yes, there are
plenty of them. All you have to do is to go and find them, and then you
have them." Said Ali Hafed, "I will go."

So he sold his farm, collected his money, left his family in charge of
a neighbor, and away he went in search of diamonds. He began his search,
very properly to my mind, at the Mountains of the Moon. Afterward he
came around into Palestine, then wandered on into Europe, and at last
when his money was all spent and he was in rags, wretchedness, and
poverty, he stood on the shore of that bay at Barcelona, in Spain, when
a great tidal wave came rolling in between the pillars of Hercules, and
the poor, afflicted, suffering, dying man could not resist the awful
temptation to cast himself into that incoming tide, and he sank beneath
its foaming crest, never to rise in this life again.

When that old guide had told me that awfully sad story he stopped the
camel I was riding on and went back to fix the baggage that was coming
off another camel, and I had an opportunity to muse over his story while
he was gone. I remember saying to myself, "Why did he reserve that
story for his 'particular friends'?" There seemed to be no beginning, no
middle, no end, nothing to it. That was the first story I had ever heard
told in my life, and would be the first one I ever read, in which the
hero was killed in the first chapter. I had but one chapter of that
story, and the hero was dead.

When the guide came back and took up the halter of my camel, he went
right ahead with the story, into the second chapter, just as though
there had been no break. The man who purchased Ali Hafed's farm one day
led his camel into the garden to drink, and as that camel put its nose
into the shallow water of that garden brook, Ali Hafed's successor
n