insisted on going, and before long he left them and traveled to Brazil, with no pity for her loneliness and her old age. The father died a little after that. A deep despair seized the woman, and she would almost have died of grief had she not found some consolation in her daughter Asma, who comes to her every Sunday with her children and spends an hour of time with her.

But Umm Jamil has another consolation, which she finds in the money she has gathered from what she saves of the garden's yield and what she has stinted herself these five years past. And after perplexity and reflection her resolve was fixed: to buy with that money a large Persian carpet, to cover with it the greater part of the hall in her house. She had seen such a carpet at her neighbor Anisa's, and from that moment the scorpions of jealousy stung her, and she determined to buy from Beirut a carpet of the same size and adorn the house with it.

And were she asked why she wants the carpet, she would be at a loss for an answer — she wants it to boast of it before people, and so that her son Jamil may inherit it when he returns from America. As for her daughter Asma, she never entered her mind. Had her daughter known of this resolve of hers, she would have charged her with madness and cried in her face, saying: What need have you of a Persian carpet? Is Emir Bashir coming to visit you? You need a set of false teeth — spend what you have on making the denture, or on replacing the wood of the stairs you go down by to the garden. Her daughter would say this and more, and no doubt she would be right in what she said. For Umm Jamil needs necessary things before the buying of the carpet — she needs a denture, and a new wooden stair in place of the broken-down stair beside the garden. And she needs a coat for winter, and a new head-veil, and shoes, and many other things.

And yet she puts all her needs out of mind to save up the price of

the carpet. A few months ago, as she was going down the wooden stairs, one of the steps broke under her, and she fell and broke her arm and suffered from the fracture a long while; and even so she did nothing but patch the broken step, for she would not spend anything of what she had put by as the price of the carpet.

The Great Feast drew near, and Umm Jamil finished cleaning

the house: she wiped the dust from the walls with a palm frond, washed the floors and the thresholds, and cleaned the pieces of furniture until everything about her was clean and shining, gladdening the eyes. And in the evening she counted the money in her bundle, and behold, it came to about eight hundred liras — that is, more than the price required.

And no sooner had the morning