Letters

his life, she whom he married that he might be hers and no one else's. Rather, he ought to have asked himself, before going to his sweetheart, whether she would have returned this love of his had her husband still been alive? — And if his love for that woman had been of a kind that required us to find excuses for him, he would not have hastened to marry when he learned that his beloved had been married off, against her will, to a wealthy man; and had he refrained, it would have been open to him to marry that woman lawfully after she lost her husband.

As for the crime that caused the misery of a mother, and the misery of a son of whom we do not know whether he took his own life or perished a vagrant in the alleys, and the wretchedness of a man living with a woman he does not love, and consequently the wretchedness of that wife (the lover's wife) who spent the flower of her life with a husband who lived with his mistress (the author neglected to inform us whether the lover deserted his wife after his attachment to his mistress, or whether that wife spent twelve years with a man of whom she had nothing but his name) — that crime, which dragged misery into the lives of two families, falls with all its consequences upon the mother's father, who refused to marry her, in the days when she was a girl, to the one she loved and who loved her, and preferred to offer his daughter as merchandise in the market of the wealthy fools.

Taha al-Gharib

And a letter full of sincere feeling and suppressed pain has been sent to us by Miss Nahida Fadli, one of our beloved Palestinian guests. Miss Fadli enclosed with it some poems of her own com-position, in which a soft poetic spirit appears, though it is still tender yet; and we have chosen from Miss Fadli this prose piece, in the hope that she will always favor us with the outpourings of her pen, for in her pen