Life is this: For a day of joy, you count
month of grief, and for a month of pleasure, you
reckon a year of pain. There is no strength
except in Allah.

Ordinarily, a man is better towards the close
than at the commencement of his career. Why?
Because then he has gained in knowledge, in
experience, and in resignation. His temper is
more even, he is less subject to be carried away
by passion, and he has acquired a settled
position in the world. But is the case the same
with a woman? By no means. Her beauty
passes; she bears no more children; she
becomes morose, uncivil, and her temper gets
sourer and sourer.

If, therefore, any one informs you that he has
married a woman of a certain age, be assured
that he has accepted two-thirds of the evil which
the life of a woman contains.

Do not meddle with what does not concern
you. Recollect that when the hounds are
furiously fighting for a morsel of meat, if they see
a jackal pass, they set off together in pursuit of
him.

When a woman has adorned her eyes with
kohol and dyed her fingers with henna, and has
chewed mesteka (the gum of the lentisk), which
perfumes the breath and whitens the teeth, she
becomes more pleasing in the sight of Allah;
for she is then more beloved of her husband.

Never marry a woman for her money; wealth
may make her insolent: nor for her beauty;
her beauty may fade. Marry her for her piety.

The goods of this world rarely bring happiness,
and they almost always exclude us from
the benefits of the next.

He who bears patiently the faults of his wife,
will receive from the hands of Allah a recompense
similar to that which he accorded to Job
after his long sufferings.

This world and the next resemble the East
and the West; you cannot draw near to the one
without turning your back on the other.

The best way of getting rid of an enemy
whose sentiments are elevated, is to pardon him:
you so make him your slave.

There was inscribed on the principal gate of
one of the cities of antiquity: To obtain
admission into a sultan's palace, the three following
ing conditions must be united: Wisdom, Riches,
and Resignation.

Lower down was written: It is not true; if
a man possessed only one of these qualities, he
would never cross the threshold of a palace.

Destiny has a hand furnished with five iron
fingers. When she chooses to submit a man to
her will, she claps two fingers on his eyes,
thrusts two fingers into his ears, and placing
the fifth on his mouth, says, "Hold your
tongue."

Death is a gate through which all must pass.
But it is not, as is believed, the gate of the
Unknown.

Have you done good?—it leads to paradise.
Have you done evil?—it conducts you to hell.

THE SIGN OF FIVE CENTURIES.

I HAVE been looking over one of the oldest
houses in London—a house with a story
attached to it—a house with a place in English
literature only second to that famous timber
domicile in Henley-street, Stratford-upon-Avon,
where Shakespeare first drew breath. The house
of which I speak is an inn, and it has been an
inn for five hundred years, or more. It is
situated about a stone-cast from one of the
greatest centres of essentially modern London
life to be found in all this vast metropolis; yet
there it lies, dim, ancient, dusty, dreamy—
wonderful even, if one begins to think of all
that has come and gone since first it hid itself
away in the venerable seclusion of its court-
yard. From the great network of railways
having their termini at the top of Tooley-street
it is not ten minutes' walk to this quaint old
house. You pass at one step from the
nineteenth century into the fourteenth. Now, you
are in all the roar of omnibuses, and cabs, and
vans, with trains departing and arriving every
minute, a hideous iron viaduct spanning the
road, and telegraphic cables vibrating in mid-
air; and now, you are in a shady nook, as quiet
as a monastery, and as reverend (if not more
so), where you ascend by external staircases
and proceed by external galleries into the
oddest of little rooms, which are as the very
coffins of dead and buried times. Supposing
you to have come from the Middlesex shore
over London Bridge, your approach to this
ancient hostelry has been in itself a curious
pilgrimage. To the left are the railway termini
already spoken of; across the road extends the
new line to Charing-cross, striking sheer down
close to the beautiful old church of St. Mary
Overies, where poet Gower lies buried under a
costly tomb, and Fletcher and Massinger occupy
a single grave in the churchyard; to the right
is the said church, lying sullenly apart at the
bottom of a little valley caused by the artificial
approaches to the bridge, as if indignant at its
modern associates; a little way off, towards the
Southwark Bridge-road, once stood the Globe
Theatre, famous for the original production of
certain plays, of which the world has heard
somewhat ever since; and straight ahead
stretches the old High-street of Southwark, not
yet greatly modernised for all its traffic, and
cherishing at its heart the ancient inn which
has brought me all this way to see it and do it
honour.

High-street, Southwark, is a land of old inns,
as any one may perceive by looking up the quiet
court-yards which open inwards from the main
thoroughfare, and which you reach by passing
under archways. Being the high road to some of
the southern and eastern counties of England,
the street has existed for centuries as one of the