Consider the last possessions that have
gone to the Dogs. Consider, friends and
countrymen, how the Dogs have been
enriched, by your despoilment at the hands of
your own blessed governors—to whom be
honour and renown, stars and garters, for
ever and ever!—on the shores of a certain
obscure spot called Balaklava, where
Britannia rules the waves in such an admirable
manner, that she slays her children (who
never never never will be slaves, but very
very very often will be dupes), by the thousand,
with every movement of her glorious
trident! When shall there be added to the
possessions of the Dogs, those columns of talk,
which, let the columns of British soldiers
vanish as they may, still defile before us
wearily, wearily, leading to nothing, doing
nothing, for the most part even saying
nothing, only enshrouding us in a mist of
idle breath that obscures the events which
are forming themselves—not into playful
shapes, believe me—beyond. If the Dogs,
lately so gorged, still so.voracious and strong,
could and would deliver a most gracious
bark, I have a strong impression that their
warning would run thus:

"My Lords and Gentlemen. We are open-
mouthed and eager. Either you must send
suitable provender to us without delay, or
you must come to us yourselves. There is no
avoidance of the alternative. Talk never
softened the three-headed dog that kept the
passage to the Shades; less will it appease
us. No jocular old gentleman throwing
sommersaults on stilts because his great-
grandmother is not worshipped in Nineveh,
is a sop to us for a moment; no hearing,
cheering, sealing-waxing, tapeing, fire-eating,
vote-eating, or other popular Club-performance,
at all imports us. We are the Dogs. We
are known to you just now, as the Dogs of
War. We crouched at your feet for employment,
as William Shakespeare, plebeian, saw
us crouching at the feet of the Fifth Harry—
and you gave it us; crying Havoc! in good
English, and letting us slip (quite by accident),
on good Englishmen. With our appetites so
whetted, we are hungry. We are sharp of
scent and quick of sight, and we see and
smell a great deal coming to us rather rapidly.
Will you give us such old rubbish as must be
ours in any case? My Lords and Gentlemen,
make haste! Something must go to the Dogs in
earnest. Shall it be you, or something else?"

THE SISTER OF THE SPIRITS.

THE merchant Zara was uneasy that day in
his shop in the Khan El-Khaleelee. He got
up from his mat more than a hundred times
to arrange goods that were not out of order,
and answered customers who came to buy
or bargain in so strange a manner that several
went away, thinking he was mad. One person
was sure of the fact, for he bought a piece of
yellow silk cheaper than if it had been common
cloth, and walked away so rapidly,
fearing the mistake would be discovered, that
he nearly overturned an old Turk, unsteady
from fat, and did not stop to laugh till he was
round the corner. As Zara was one of the
richest Christian merchants of Cairo, he would
not have spent much time in regret even if he
had discovered the mistake. But he had no
leisure to think of matters of profit and loss.
His mind was away in another place, hovering
over a dwelling in a retired street not far off,
where one whom he loved, and by whom he
was loved, suffered and smiled, hoped and
feared—pale as a lily, yet joyful as a rose
tree when the first bud reddens on its
greenest spray.

Two hours after noon, a black girl, without
her mantle, which she had forgotten to throw
over her shoulders—indeed, they had pushed
and hustled her out of the house as if she had
been a thief—came and advanced, her great
round ebony face, that beamed with one vast
smile, into the shop, and said, swearing,—

"Wallah! thou didst not deserve it."

"Speak reverently," quoth the merchant,
reddening to the roots of his beard, "for I am
going to pray; shall it be for the health of a
son or a daughter?"

"Pray first," said the girl, maliciously.

"Wallah! " exclaimed the merchant, swearing
also, " I will neither pray nor listen."

With these words, he dropped a net over
the front of his shop, and, getting up, went
down the bazaar, turned into a narrow street,
and ran so fast that the black girl could
scarcely keep pace with him. When he came
to the door of his house, however, he stopped
to gather breath and gravity, and then
entered, saying, " Blessings on all those who
may be under this roof!" He went softly up
stairs, trying in vain to seem at home, but really
looking, as we all do on such occasions, says
the narrator, as if he had no right to be there.

Zara had married, rather late in life, a
young girl, whom her parents gave him for
his wealth, and who loved him for his goodness.
Her name was Martha: and fortune,
in distributing her gifts, had made her wise
instead of beautiful, for which her cousins—
all lovely maidens, coquettish and proud—
pitied her exceedingly. But Zara had seen
the world, and prudence told him not to put
his wrinkled visage and grey beard by the
side of blooming cheeks and passionate eyes
and ruby lips and all the qualities of form
given to some few of the daughters of earth,
that poets and youths may follow them and
grow mad. He wanted a gentle house
companion for himself, not a beacon to attract
others, and Martha satisfied his ambition for
many years.

But at length—so is man framed—the
house, which had at first seemed full to the
very innermost corners of light, became in his
eyes dimmer and duller. Martha was not
less sweet and diligent; but Zara yearned
for something, he knew not at first what. In