But in the midst of your weariness and despair, more alluring than the mirage of cool lakes and green valleys to the eye of the dying Bedoueen, a voice of running water sings through your memory, -the sound of streams gurgling under the village bridge at evening, and the laughter of boys bathing there,-yourself a boy, yourself plunging in the deep, dark coolness,-and so, wearied and fevered in the desert of Arabia, you are overflowed by the memory of your youth, and to you, as to Khadra, the sun has been Mandragora and you are sleeping. You cannot tell how long you sleep and doze. You fancy, when your eyes at length open, that you are more deeply dreaming.

For the pomp of a wintry landscape dazzles your awaking. The sweeps and drifts of the sand hills among which you are winding, have the sculpturesque grace of snow. They descend in strange corrugations to a long level lake-a reach of water frozen into transparent blue ice, streaked with the white sifted snow that has overblown it. The seeming lake is circled with low, melancholy hills. They are bare, like the rock-setting of solitary mountain tarns. The death of wintry silence broods over the whole, but the sky is cloudless, and the sun sets supreme over the miraculous landscape.

Vainly you rally your

thoughts, and smile at the perfect mirage. Its lines do not melt in your smiles, and the spectacle becomes more solemn in the degree that you are conscious of the delusion. Never, upon its eternal Alpine throne, never, through the brief, brilliant days of New England December, was winter more evident and entire.

And when you hear behind you, sole sound in the desert, the shrill tenor of the Armenian's cameldriver, chanting in monotonous refrain songs whose meaning you can only imagine, because Khadra draws aside the curtains to listen, and because you have seen that the tall, swarthy Syrian is enamoured of Khadra, then it is not Arabia, nor Switzerland, nor New England, but a wintry glade of Lapland, and a solitary singing to his reindeer.

This is not a dream, nor has leering Fever touched you with his finger, but it is a mystery of the desert. You have eaten an apple of the Hesperides. For the Bedoueen poets have not alone the shifting cloud-scenery to garnish their romances, but thus, unconsciously to them, the forms of another landscape and of another life than theirs, are marshalled before their eyes, and their minds are touched with the beauty of an unknown experience.

In this variety of aspect, in endless calm, the

desert surpasses the sea. It is seldom an unbroken level, and from the quality of its atmosphere, slight objects are magnified, and a range of mounds will often masque as a group of goodly hills. Even in the most interrupted reaches, the horizon is rarely a firm line, but the mirage breaks it, so that the edge of the landscape is always quivering and uncertain.

Pleasant, after the wild romance of such a desert day-romance, which the sun in setting, closes to reach the camping-ground, to gurgle in MacWhirter's ear with the guttural harshness that he understands as the welcome signal of rest, and to feel him, not without a growl of ill-humour, quaking and rolling beneath you, and finally, with a half sudden start, sinking to the ground.

You tie his bent fore-knee together, with the halter which goes around his head; and you turn to see that the tent is not spread over stones, which would not stuff your pillar softly. Then, returning, you observe that MacWhirter with his fore-leg still bent and bound to his head, is limping upon the three serviceable legs to browse upon chance shrubs, and to assert his total independence of you, and contempt of your precautions.

Meanwhile, Khadra steps out of her palanquin, and while her father's camp is pitched, she shakes

out the silken fulness of her shintyan, and strolls off upon the desert. The old Armenian slips the pad from the back of his white mare, for he does not ride in a saddle, and stands in every body's way, in his long, blue broadcloth kaftan, taking huge pinches of snuff.

The Commander, relieved of his arsenal, bustles among our Arabs, swearing at them lustily whenever he approaches the Howadji, apparently convinced that everything is going well, so long as he makes noise enough.

"Therein not peculiar," murmurs the Pacha, rolled up in his huge woollen capote, and smoking a contemplative chibouque.

The tents are pitched, the smoke curls to the sky, and the howling wilderness is tamed by the domestic preparations of getting tea.

The sun also is tamed, our great romancer, our fervent poet, our glorious painter, who has made the day a poem and a picture, who has peopled memory with sweet and sad imagery, who, like Jesus, brought a sword, yet like him, has given us rest. He, too, is tamed, and his fervour is failing. Yet as he retires through the splendour of the vapoury architecture of his pavilion in the West, he looks at us once more, like a king from his palace windows.

CHAPTER XI.

UNDER THE SYRIAN STARS.

So glides away the slow caravan of desert days. But when they have passed over the western horizon, out of the East, come the soft-footed evening hours. The camels are tethered, the Arabs crone over the fire, one bursts into a wailing minor song. The night swallows the sound, and only the stars shine.

And even as you might vaguely discern the sheen of Persian silks, and scent the odour of rare fruits in a caravan from Bagdad, passing your camp in the moonlight, so through the twilight of reverie pass the stately forms of noble thoughts, and the night is perfumed with hopes that love the future.

Like a night of meditation after a busy day, is the desert journey after our busy life.

And still, as in midnight musings, wherever you may be, your whole individual experience lies before