when we were coming out of the pottery. And of a truth, his paunch and double chin and ruddy cheeks seemed to illustrate what the priest told me about his usurious propensities.
“What a contrast between him and the swarthy, leathery, hungry-looking potters. I can not think that Nature has aught to do with these naked inequalities. I can not believe that, to produce one roseate complexion, she must etiolate a thousand. I can not see how, in drinking from the same gushing spring, and breathing the same mountain air, and basking in the same ardent sun, the khawaja gets a double chin and the peasant a double curse. But his collops and his ruddiness are due to the fact that he misgoverns as well as his Pasha and his Sultan. He battens, even like a Tammany chief, on political jobbery, on extortion, on usury. His tree is better manured, so to speak; manured by the widows and tended by the orphans of his little kingdom. In a word, this great khawaja is what I call a political coprophagist. Hence, his suspicious growth, his lustre and lustiness.
“But he is not the only example in the village of this superabundance of health; the priests are many more. For I must not fail to mention that, in addition to its potteries and founderies, the town is blessed with a dozen churches. Every family, a sort of tribe, has its church and priests; and consequently, its feuds with all the others.
It is a marvel how the people, in the lethal soot and smoke of strife and dissension, can work and produce anything.
Farewell, ye swarthy people! Farewell, O village of bells and potteries! Were it not for the khawaja who misgoverns thee, and the priests who sow their iniquity in thee, thou shouldst have been an ideal town.
I look back, as I descend into the wadi, and behold, thou art as beautiful in the day as thou art in the night. Thy pink gables under a December sky seem not as garish as they do in summer. And the sylvan slopes, clustered