ood was bread, nothing else; instead of tea, he drank from a
running brook. Still, he remained happy and content. His great joy was to
enter the presence of Baha'u'llah; reunion with his Beloved was bounty
enough; his food was to look upon the beauty of the Manifestation; his
wine, to be with Baha'u'llah. He was always smiling, always silent; but at
the same time, his heart shouted, leapt and danced.

Often, he was in the company of 'Abdu'l-Baha. He was an excellent friend
and comrade, happy, delightful; favored by Baha'u'llah, respected by the
friends, shunning the world, trusting in God. There was no fickleness in
him, his inner condition was always the same: stable, constant, firmly
rooted as the hills.

Whenever I call him to mind, and remember that patience and serenity, that
loyalty, that contentment, involuntarily I find myself asking God to shed
His bounties upon Aqa 'Ali. Misfortunes and calamities were forever
descending on that estimable man. He was always ill, continually subjected
to unnumbered physical afflictions. The reason was that when at home and
serving the Faith in Qazvin, he was caught by the malevolent and they beat
him so brutally over the head that the effects stayed with him till his
dying hour. They abused and tormented him in many ways and thought it
permissible to inflict every kind of cruelty upon him; yet his only crime
was to have become a believer, and his only sin, to have loved God. As the
poet has written, in lines that illustrate the plight of Aqa 'Ali:

By owls the royal falcon is beset.
They rend his wings, though he is free of sin.
"Why"--so they mock--"do you remember yet
That royal wrist, that palace you were in?"
He is a kingly bird: this crime he did commit.
Except for beauty, what was Joseph's sin?

Briefly, that great man spent his time in the Akka prison, praying,
supplicating, turning his face toward God. Infinite bounty enfolded him;
he was favored by Baha'u'llah, much of the time admitted to His presence
and showered with endless grace. This was his joy and his delight, his
great good fortune, his dearest wish.

Then the fixed hour was upon him, the daybreak of his hopes, and it came
his turn to soar away, into the invisible realm. Sheltered under the
protection of Baha'u'llah, he went swiftly forth to that mysterious land.
To him be salutations and praise and mercy from the Lord of this world and
the world to come. May God light up his resting-place with rays from