hey go forth to meet him,
conduct him into their villages, hospitably entertain him, insist on
his tarrying long with them; and if the visitor be a handsome young
fellow, the loveliest eyes that ever smiled and wept grow moist at
his departure. Who amongst those who have been lulled to sleep in
Himri by the songs of the lovely and bewitching Circassian girls could
ever have dreamed that the time would come when these mountain walls
all round about would be dyed red with the blood of thousands and
thousands of strangers, who came thither to seek death, and found what
they sought?

The house of the meritorious sheik differed in no respect from the
dwellings of the other inhabitants. It also was entirely built of
timber, consisted of four rooms leading one out of another, and two
venerable nut-trees stood in front of it.

Kasi Mollah sits outside, leaning tranquilly against the door-post
beneath the projecting eaves, both sides of which are covered by large
scarlet-runners, plaiting with great care and solemnity a whip out of
twelve fine thongs of kid-skin hanging on a crooked nail.

Squatting on the ground beside him on a bear-skin sits a
peculiar-looking stranger. Even if you had not seen it in his features
and clothing, his mules standing before the door would have told you
that he did not belong to these parts. He was, indeed, a Greek
merchant from Smyrna, who visited Circassia every year to purchase
kid-skins--or, so he said. He had three palaces in Smyrna; but it is
scarcely credible that he could have acquired them by his kid-skins
only. At any rate, his mules were laden now with whole bundles of furs
and pelts, and the merchant was toasting his host in a sour beverage,
made by the Circassian from horse's milk, the evil odor of which he
was striving to dispel with the smoke of good Latakia tobacco.

It was for him also that the Circassian was making that long
mule-driving whip of thongs of twelve different colors, serpentine in
shape, and plaited at the ends with beautiful white horse-hair; and
when it was ready he smacked it so vigorously, by way of showing it
off, that the merchant could scarce save his eyes from it.

"A pretty whip, and a good whip," he said, at last, in order that its
owner might leave off cracking it.

"I'll very soon prove whether it is a good whip or not," said the
Circassian, without moving a muscle of his brown, oval-shaped,
apathetic face; and with that he began to make the handle o