“ ‘I have been going through such an exercise for a year, and soon I shall leave my cloister in the pines.’
“ ‘What say you? You are leaving our neighbourhood? No, no; remain here, O Khalid. Come, live with me in the Hermitage. Come back to Mother Church; return not to the wicked world. O Khalid, we must inherit the Kingdom of Allah, and we can not do so by being anarchist like the prowlers of the forest. Meditate on the insignificance and evanescence of human life.’
“ ‘But it lies within us, O my Brother, to make it significant and eternal.’
“ ‘Yes, truly, in the bosom of Mother Church. Come back to your Mother—come to the Hermitage—let us pass this life together.’
“ ‘And what will you do, if in the end you discover that I am in the right?’
“Here he paused a moment, and, casting on me a benignant glance, makes this reply:
‘Then, I will rejoice, rejoice,’ he gasped; ‘for we shall both be in the right. You will become an anarchist like me and not against the wretched authorities of the world, but against your real enemies, Instinct and Reason.’
“And thus, now and then, he would salt his argument with a pinch of casuistic wit. Once he was hard set, and, to escape the alternatives of the situation, he condescended to tell me the story of his first and only love.
“ ‘In my youth,’ said the Hermit, ‘I was a shoemaker, and not a little fastidious as a craftsman. In fact, I am, and always have been, an extremist, a purist. I can not tolerate the cobblings of life. Either do your work skilfully, devotedly, earnestly, or do it not. So, as a shoemaker, I succeeded very well. Truth to tell, my work was as good, as neat, as elegant as that of the best craftsman in Beirut. And you know, Beirut is