parents, thus expresses the grief which overwhelms him:  “I desire to lie down in my chamber,—­for I am sick on thy account,—­and the neighbours come to visit me.—­Ah! if my sister but came with them,—­she would show the physicians what ailed me,—­for she knows my sickness!” Even while he thus complains, he sees her in his imagination, and his spirit visits the places she frequents:  “The villa of my sister,—­(a pool is before the house),—­the door opens suddenly,—­and my sister passes out in wrath.—­Ah! why am I not the porter,—­that she might give me her orders!—­I should at least hear her voice, even were she angry,—­and I, like a little boy, full of fear before her!” Meantime the young girl sighs in vain for “her brother, the beloved of her heart,” and all that charmed her before has now ceased to please her.  “I went to prepare my snare, my cage and the covert for my trap—­for all the birds of Puanit alight upon Egypt, redolent with perfume;—­he who flies foremost of the flock is attracted by my worm, bringing odours from Puanit,—­its claws full of incense.—­But my heart is with thee, and desires that we should trap them together,—­I with thee, alone, and that thou shouldest be able to hear the sad cry of my perfumed bird,—­there near to me, close to me, I will make ready my trap,—­O my beautiful friend, thou who goest to the field of the well-beloved!” The latter, however, is slow to appear, the day passes away, the evening comes on:  “The cry of the goose resounds—­which is caught by the worm-bait,—­but thy love removes me far from the bird, and I am unable to deliver myself from it; I will carry off my net, and what shall I say to my mother,—­when I shall have returned to her?—­Every day I come back laden with spoil,—­but to-day I have not been able to set my trap,—­for thy love makes me its prisoner!” “The goose flies away, alights,—­it has greeted the barns with its cry;—­the flock of birds increases on the river, but I leave them alone and think only of thy love,—­for my heart is bound to thy heart—­and I cannot tear myself away from thy beauty.”  Her mother probably gave her a scolding, but she hardly minds it, and in the retirement of her chamber never wearies of thinking of her brother, and of passionately crying for him:  “O my beautiful friend!  I yearn to be with thee as thy wife—­and that thou shouldest go whither thou wishest with thine arm upon my arm,—­for then I will repeat to my heart, which is in thy breast, my supplications.—­If my great brother does not come to-night,—­I am as those who lie in the tomb—­for thou, art thou not health and life,—­he who transfers the joys of thy health to my heart which seeks thee?” The hours pass away and he does not come, and already “the voice of the turtle-dove speaks,—­it says:  ‘Behold, the dawn is here, alas! what is to become of me?’ Thou, thou art the bird, thou callest me,—­and I find my brother in his chamber,—­and my heart is rejoiced to see him!—­I will never go away again, my hand will remain in thy hand,—­and when I