it, that the spirit of Khalid shall yet flow among your pilgrim caravans, through the fertile deserts of Arabia, down to the fountainhead of Faith, to Mecca and Medina,” et cetera.
This, perhaps the last of the rhapsodies of Khalid’s, the Reader considering the circumstances under which it was written, will no doubt condone. Further, however, in the K.L. MS. we can not now proceed. Certainly the Author is not wanting in the sort of courage which is loud-lunged behind the writing table; his sufficiency of spirit is remarkable, unutterable. But we would he knew that the strong do not exult in their strength, nor the wise in their wisdom. For to fly and philosophize were one thing, and to philosophize in prison were another. Khalid this time does not follow closely in the way of the Masters. But he would have done so, if we can believe Shakib in this, had not Mrs. Gotfry persuaded him to the contrary. He would have stood in the Turkish Areopagus at Constantinople, defended himself somewhat Socratic before his judges, and hung out his tung on a rickety gibbet in the neighborhood of St. Sophia. But Mrs. Gotfry spoiled his great chance. She cheated him of the glory of dying for a noble cause.
“The Turks are not worth the sacrifice,” Shakib heard her say, when Khalid ejaculated somewhat about martyrdom. And when she offered to accompany him, the flight did not seem shameful in his eyes. Nay, it became necessary; and under the circumstances it was, indeed, cowardice not to fly. For is it not as noble to surrender one’s self to Love as to the Turks or any other earthly despotism? Gladly, heroically, he adventures forth, therefore, and philosophizes on the way about the light that flows from the wounds of persecution. But we regret that this celestial stream is not unmixed; it is accompanied by blood and pus; by distention and fever, and other inward and outward sores.
In this grievous state, somewhat like Don Quixote after the Battle of the Mill, our Khalid enters Baalbek. If the reader likes the comparison