me.”  He has a good heart, but a heart always ready to be set on fire, either by a ray of the sun or by a spark of hell.  Nature has gifted him with all that is necessary to render him a man, as well in his moral as physical constitution; but national prejudices, and the want of education, have done all that is possible to disfigure and to corrupt these natural qualities.  His mind is a mixture of all sorts of inconsistencies, of the most absurd ideas, and of the soundest thoughts:  sometimes he seizes instantly abstract propositions when they are presented to him in a simple form, and again he will obstinately oppose the plainest and most evident truths:  because the former are quite new to him, and the latter are obscured by previous prejudices and impressions.  I begin to fancy that it is easier to build a new edifice than to reconstruct an old one.

But how happens it that Ammalat is melancholy and absent?  He makes great progress in every thing that does not require an attentive and continuous reflection, and a gradual development; but when the matter involves remote consequences, his mind resembles a short fire-arm, which sends its charge quickly, direct, and strongly, but not to any distance.  Is this a defect of his mind? or is it that his attention is entirely occupied with something else? ...  For a man of twenty-three, however, it is easy to imagine the cause.  Sometimes he appears to be listening attentively to what I am telling him; but when I ask for his answer, he seems all abroad.  Sometimes I find the tears flowing from his eyes:  I address him—­he neither hears nor sees me.  Last night he was restless in his sleep, and I heard the word “seltanet—­seltanet,” (power, power,) frequently escape him.  Is it possible that the love of power can so torment a young heart?  No, no! another passion agitates, troubles the soul of Ammalat.  Is it for me to doubt of the symptoms of love’s divine disease?  He is in love—­he is passionately in love; but with whom?  Oh, I will know!  Friendship is as curious as a woman.

OCCUPATION OF ADEN.

“It is only by a naval power,” says Gibbon, “that the reduction of Yemen can be successfully attempted”—­a remark, by the way, which more than one of the ancients had made before him.  All the comparatively fertile districts in the south of Arabia, in fact, are even more completely insulated by the deserts and barren mountains of the interior on one side, than by the sea on the other—­inasmuch as easier access would be gained by an invader, even by the dangerous and difficult navigation of the Red Sea, than by a march through a region where the means of subsistence do not exist, and where the Bedoweens, by choking or concealing the wells, might in a moment cut off even the scanty supply of water which the country affords.  This mode of passive resistance was well understood and practised by them as early as the time of AElius Gallus, the first Roman general who conceived the hope of rifling the virgin treasures popularly believed to be buried in the inaccessible hoards of the princes of Arabia, whose realms were long looked upon—­perhaps on the principle of omne ignotum pro magnifico—­as a sort of indefinite and mysterious El Dorado. [31]