Mr. Gibran Massoud is an M.A. instructor at the American University of Beirut and one of those who have tried their hand at the story; he has more than one book in the form, and he is distinguished by his understanding of the man of the street and of that expressive class of people whom nobody heeds... Listen to him as he describes, and menaces, the wretched hopes!? We are pleased to present Mr. Massoud to the readers of “The Woman's Voice” in a story from the very heart of our life — “Hamdoun.”

From the day the “basket” mounted his back, and the two straps clutched at his shoulders, wrenching them backward while they sagged and hunched, terrified, over his chest, worries beset his head and set about rattling him, black and overpowering. Before long his world began to shrink and shrink — now taking the shape of a banquet, now the size of a bed, now dwindling to a mouthful — until at last it settled at the bottom of his basket: and behold, his basket was his life and his world, filling as it filled with people's pur-chases and people's bundles, and whistling hollow, bared like a grin, so long as it stayed empty. How many times, when no eyes were watching, he flung his basket to the ground and fell upon it with all his might, kicking and trampling, charging every blow with some of the storming hatred that beset his heart, and joining to it a sharp curse damning life, and everyone in life, and everything in life!

A serpent's life, his life! How wretched he was — he, Hamdoun — and how ignorant, the day he believed that the basket would put an end to his pains, and would spare him, as long as he lived, the humiliation of begging. He was a green boy then, who saw in the face of life nothing but comeliness, and glimpsed in the future nothing

but a goodness that would prevail over every hardship. And so he said to himself one day: “Listen, Hamdoun, listen well. Enough of vagrancy and begging. A vagrant you are, Hamdoun; a Kurd you are; your mountains cast you out, from where there was no homeland to where there is no homeland. And here you are, roaming the streets of Beirut, head shaven, nose running, feet cracked, the sack your mother contrived into a sort of garment that barely covers your nakedness now in shreds, stretching out your hand to the passers-by, bending your head to one side in abjection and drawling your words like every little Kurdish beggar... Then your mother bought you a box of chewing gum — the earnings of fingers frayed by scalding water and potash — and behold, you were a beggar of a new type: an aristocratic beggar.

People no longer toss you a ‘God will provide’; instead they grow weary of you. Did you not trail one of the young ladies one day from Burj Square all the way to the Old Serail Square, whining without tiring: ‘Lady, lady, do us a kindness’? They have a right to grumble. How many people you trail after, coaxing five piasters out of them, when they were only walking ahead of you to escape paying five piasters on the tram! And then... would you drive people to eat up their francs with nothing to fill them?... Leave the gum, Hamdoun; take the advice your mother gave you: get yourself a basket and hold fast to a stand, and you will be delivered from people's charity — and from the curses of the ticket-takers on the tram.”

Thus did Hamdoun address himself that day. Energy filled his frame, and hope rocked his soul with sweet wishes. He was fit to carry the whole world in his basket, to win the honorable morsel he could eat without its lodging in his throat like the burrs and thorns of human charity.

And how Hamdoun swaggered the day he carried the basket! It was, in truth, a basket and no basket like it: gleaming white wicker,

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