’I was brought up to respect the laws of God and the prophet.  When I came to marriageable age, and, “unsight, unseen,” was induced to espouse the veiled Amina, it was, as we say in Bagdad, like “buying a pig in a poke,” although rumor greatly magnified her charms, and a secret inclination prompted me.  I longed eagerly for the wedding-day; and when her face was revealed to conjugal eyes, methought that Mahomet had sent down a houri from his paradise.  Yet I found out, to my cost, that a little knowledge of a woman is worse than ignorance, and that the blinding light of beauty hides the truth more than the thick veil of darkness.  Oh, her bosom was white as the snows of Lebanon, and her eyes were like those of the dear gazelle.  Cheeks had she as red as the Damascus rose, and a halo encircled her like that of the moon.  Her smiles were sunshine, her lips dropped honey.  I thought I saw upon her shoulders the cropping out of angelic wings.  I sought out the carpets of Persia for the soft touch of her tiny feet, and hired all the lutes of Bagdad to be strung in praise of my beloved.  I sent plum-cake to the newspapers, and placed a costly fee in the hand of the priest.  Oh, blissful moments!  But I purchased hell with them, for she began to lead me a dog’s life.  She had no taste for home, no appetite for healthful food; she ran me into debt, hated my friends, loved my enemies, and changed her soft looks into daggers to stab me with.  Her bloom became blight; her lips oozed out poison, and she dabbled in corrupt things.  I tracked her footsteps from my sacred couch as they led to the very brink of the grave.

’O, my son, beware of your partner in the dance of life; for, as Mahomet used to say, in his jocular moods, ’those who will dance must pay the fiddler.’  To be tied, forever, for better, for worse, to such a ——­ as Amina Ghoul, is to be transformed in one’s whole nature.  It is the transmigration of a soul from amiability to peevishness, from activity to discouragement, from love to hate, and from high-souled sentiment to the dog-kennel of humility.  Go thou, and don’t do likewise.

’Woe is me!  Who takes one wrong step, gets out of it by another; and so I went on from enchantment to enchantment, and fell out of the frying-pan into the fire.  If I stood erect, and no longer groveled, if I was not any more a beast, I became like the devils which possessed them.  So did I scourge and lash the object of my hatred with feelings of the deadliest revenge.

’Oh, my Ben Hadad, presume not from my ultimate escape.  If I have ceased to snap and snarl and growl,—­if I now, in the decline of life, pursue the even tenor of my way,—­if I have been redeemed from snares, and learned even to forgive my enemies, it is because the fair Xarifa represented my better nature, and that has triumphed because I took counsel of her.  Farewell, my son, and, in the pilgrimage of life, reflect upon the dear-bought experience of SIDI NORMAN.’