souvenir to an American lady two of the
beautiful old tiles from his house, whereof I had one. In the eyes of a
Muslim there is a degree of sanctity attached to this tile, as one on
which the eyes of the prophet may have rested,--or at least the eyes of
those who were nearer to him than we are. Long after I returned from
Cairo I wrote and published a fairy-book called Johnnykin, {292} in which
occurred the following lines:--

Trust not the Ghoul, love,
Heed not his smile;
_Out of the Mosque_, _love_,
_He stole the tile_.

One day my friend the Palmer from over the sea came to me with a present.
It was a beautiful Persian tile.

"Where did you get it?" I asked.

"I stole it out of a mosque in Syria."

"Did you ever read my Johnnykin?"

"Of course not."

"I know you never did." Here I repeated the verse. "But you remember
what the Persian poet says:--

"'And never since the vine-clad earth was young
Was some great crime committed on the earth,
But that some poet prophesied the deed.'"

"True, and also what the great Tsigane poet sang:--

"'O manush te lela sossi choredo,
Wafodiro se te choramengro.'

"He who takes the stolen ring,
Is worse than he who stole the thing."

"And it would have been better for you, while you were _dukkerin_ or
prophesying, to have prophesied about something more valuable than a
tile."

And so it came to pass that the two Persian tiles, one given by a
descendant of the Prophet, and the other the subject of a prophecy, rest
in my cabinet side by side.

In Egypt, as in Austria, or Syria, or Persia, or India, the gypsies are
the popular musicians. I had long sought for the derivation of the word
_banjo_, and one day I found that the Oriental gypsies called a gourd by
that name. Walking one day with the Palmer in Cambridge, we saw in a
window a very fine Hindu lute, or in fact a real banjo made of a gourd.
We inquired, and found that it belonged to a mutual friend, Mr. Charles
Brookfield, one of the best fellows living, and who, on being forthwith
"requisitioned" by the unanimous voice of all who sympathized with me in
my need, sent me the instrument. "He did not think it right," he said,
"to keep it, when Philology wanted it. If it had been any other
party,--but he always had a particular respect and awe of her." I do not
assert that this discovery settles the origin of the word _banjo_, but
the coincidence is, to say