mountains; but in my village I see only cold hollows and dark huts and abandoned pathways. My village is drowned in darkness — who will wipe away our misery?

You helped me approach people with the key of goodness; you made lovely to me the love of giving, the love of the gift that comes back with no favor claimed and no harm. And before my eyes the people of my village scramble over the loaf, fight over water, and make enemies of one another over a few grapes or a basket of figs.

Night in my village is desolate and dismal, lit by faint lamps; and the weddings in my village are more desolate than any night, for in them the child of ten is given in marriage to the man of thirty; in them the ring of joy is like wailing, and even the sweet dabkeh — no steps keep its order.

The people of my village have begun to suspect me — the secret of my silence amid their clamor, my solitude amid their gatherings, my reading while they drudge at labor and toil. As for my family, they have begun to fear me — to fear the devil who, they were told, must have possessed me after some fright or shudder. So the village folk advised them to lower me into a deep well, my head hung down, to the basmala of the village sheikhs and the trilling of the women.

I proposed to the people of my village that they send me their children to teach without payment;

but they paid me no heed, and their boys followed me, pelting me with stones!!

My lady: you wished me nothing but good, all good; yet you sent me misery from where you never intended and never knew. If you would repeat the experiment a second time, muster for it a great number of women workers of good, to carry on teaching on a comprehensive scale throughout my poor village.

I folded the letter — and there was my friend, pressing my hand and saying: We shall muster the doers of good.

•

But while I was leafing through the evening paper, I came upon a murder; I had scarcely finished reading it when the news struck me like a thunderbolt:

My God! It was she — Khadija, killed by her brother's dagger when she refused to marry her cousin.

I went to my friend, and no sooner did she see me than a tear started from her eye and she said: I have brought this upon her!!

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