ke the noise, and still more foxes come,
and Simpson catch hold of their tails and tie their tails together,
till he got hundreds and hundreds.'

'Whatever did he do with them?' inquired the parson.

'He set fire to them.'

'What on earth did he do that for?'

'That, sir, was to annoy his wife's relations.'

'And would you believe it,' added Suleyman when he told me the story,
'that foolish preacher did not know that it is in the Bible. He took
it all down in his notebook as the exploit of a Jewish traveller. He
was the Heavy One.'

The last remark was in allusion to an Arabic proverb of which Suleyman
was very fond:

'When the Heavy One alights in the territory of a people there is
nothing for the inhabitants except departure.'

Which, in its turn, is an allusion to the following story:

A colony of ducks lived on an island in a river happily until a
certain day, when the carcase of an ox came drifting down the current
and stuck upon the forepoint of that island. They tried in vain to
lift it up or push it off; it was too heavy to be moved an inch by all
their efforts. They named it in their speech the Heavy One. Its stench
infected the whole island, and kept on increasing until the hapless
ducks were forced to emigrate.

Many Heavy Ones fell to the lot of Suleyman as dragoman, and he was by
temperament ill-fitted to endure their neighbourhood. Upon the other
hand, he sometimes happened on eccentrics who rejoiced his heart. An
American admiral, on shore in Palestine for two days, asked only one
thing: to be shown the tree on which Judas Iscariot had hanged
himself, in order that he might defile it in a natural manner and so
attest his faith. Suleyman was able to conduct him to the very tree,
and to make the journey occupy exactly the time specified. The
American was satisfied, and wrote him out a handsome testimonial.

It must have been a hardship for Suleyman--a man by nature sensitive
and independent--to take his orders from some kinds of tourists and
endure their rudeness. If left alone to manage the whole journey, he
was--I have been told, and I can well believe it--the best guide in
Syria, devoting all his energies to make the tour illuminating and
enjoyable; if heckled or distrusted, he grew careless and eventually
dangerous, intent to play off jokes on people whom he counted enemies.
One Englishman, with a taste for management but little knowledge of
the country, and no common sense, he cruelly obe