On his way Alwyn met many of his countrymen,—­travellers who, like himself, had visited the Caucasus and Armenia and were now en route, some for Damascus, some for Jerusalem and the Holy Land—­ others again for Cairo and Alexandria, to depart from thence homeward by the usual Mediterranean line, . . but among these birds-of-passage acquaintance he chanced upon none who were going to the Ruins of Babylon.  He was glad of this—­for the peculiar nature of his enterprise rendered a companion altogether undesirable,—­and though on one occasion he encountered a gentleman-novelist with a note-book, who was exceedingly anxious to fraternize with him and discover whither he vas bound, he succeeded in shaking off this would-be incubus at Mosul, by taking him to a wonderful old library in that city where there were a number of French translations of Turkish and Syriac romances.  Here the gentleman-novelist straightway ascended to the seventh heaven of plagiarism, and began to copy energetically whole scenes and descriptive passages from dead-and-gone authors, unknown to English critics, for the purpose of inserting them hereafter into his own “original” work of fiction—­and in this congenial occupation he forgot all about the “dark handsome man, with the wide brows of a Marc Antony and the lips of a Catullus,” as he had already described Alwyn in the note-book before-mentioned.  While in Mosul, Alwyn himself picked up a curiosity in the way of literature,—­a small quaint volume entitled “The Final Philosophy Of Algazzali The Arabian.”  It was printed in two languages—­the original Arabic on one page, and, facing it, the translation in very old French.  The author, born A.D. 1058, described himself as “a poor student striving to discern the truth of things”—­and his work was a serious, incisive, patiently exhaustive inquiry into the workings of nature, the capabilities of human intelligence, and the deceptive results of human reason.  Reading it, Alwyn was astonished to find that nearly all the ethical propositions offered for the world’s consideration to-day by the most learned and cultured minds, had been already advanced and thoroughly discussed by this same Algazzali.  One passage in particular arrested his attention as being singularly applicable to his own immediate condition, . . it ran as follows,—­

“I began to examine the objects of sensation and speculation to see if they could possibly admit of doubt.  Then, doubts crowded upon me in such numbers that my incertitude became complete.  Whence results the confidence I have in sensible things?  The strongest of all our senses is sight,—­yet if we look at the stars they seem to be as small as money-pieces—­but mathematical proofs convince us that they are larger than the earth.  These and other things are judged by the senses, but rejected by reason as false.  I abandoned the senses therefore, having seen my confidence in their absolute truth shaken.  Perhaps,