of the feast come than she sur-prised her visitors with a large Persian carpet she had spread

in the hall of the house; and when they asked her where she had come by this carpet, she answered that her son had sent her a sum of money so that she might buy it from Beirut.

For a time Umm Jamil remained taken with the beauty of the carpet. She cleaned it every morning with a special brush and sat long hours contemplating its patterns and its colors, and she feared to tread on it with her feet; and when her daughter's children came to visit her she kept them from entering the hall and made them come into the garden by the back door, lest they romp beside the carpet or touch it with their feet. And she wrote to her son telling him of the purchase of the large Persian carpet, and wishing he would soon come back to the homeland, that she might show it to him and pass with him what remained of her life.

His answer reached her a little later. He told her that he was ill and that he wished to return to the homeland; but he was penniless, and he asked her to send him money so that he could return.

Umm Jamil wept the night the letter arrived, and shed tears she had not shed since her husband's death. She must send her son the sum he asked. That is, she must sell the carpet on whose price she had spent so many years of gathering, denying herself neces-sary things in order to buy it. But children are not to be weighed against livelihood or money. Her son must come back, whatever it cost her. She would live with him content with a bare sufficiency, and his companionship would make up to her for every loss.

Early in the morning she went to Beirut by the bus and sold the carpet, and other precious vessels besides, of what she had stored in her house; and there gathered in her hands about a thousand liras, which she sent to her

son, and she stayed waiting for his answer.

And she waited long before the answer came. In it: that her son had recovered and his financial circumstances had improved; and that he intended to marry a Brazilian girl, and did not know when he could come back to the homeland.

Was the son truthful in his claims, or was he a liar, deceiving his mother and trading on her tenderness? We do not know what passed through the mother's head; but from that time on her circumstances changed and her plan of living altered. She saved from the garden's yield enough to have a denture made and to buy a coat to shield her from the winter cold. And she spent the rest on making a new wooden stair for the garden and on buying shoes and a kerchief. She put the matter of the carpet out of mind, and gave up standing every day beside the window waiting for the mail carrier to pass.