the end of which Gibran turned back to Boston, having mastered his Arabic to the point of wonder, and I sailed to Rome, a student of art, in which I drowned up to my ears...”

•

“In Paris, in 1910, we met again, art having become an inseparable part of our inmost selves, of our daily life — and the delight of delights was our working in a single studio, and the resumption of our literary and philosophical rounds, in which Gibran had attained a lofty reach... and our hiring a single Model — for economy!! Those are precious months of my life.

“I remember well the day I turned toward him, the light streaming upon his head; I turned quickly from the model, and in three quarters of an hour I had finished drawing him... I remember how Gibran gasped at the drawing and how it pleased him!... And with his own brush he made this rounded shape on the chest. The drawing survives among his effects in Bsharri.”

•

“After his return to America no coolness touched our friendship. We went on finding in the exchange of talk a solace for our two souls. In one of his letters to me he says:

“‘My labors are climbing toward the mountain's summit, my thoughts are calm, and my body enjoys all the felt pleasure that health can give; but I am not to be envied, Youssef; my soul is hungry and thirsty for a food and drink I know not where to find. The soul is a flower of the heights that cannot live in the shade; as for thorns, they live everywhere.’

“...And at times, when Gibran was in revolt against his condition, weary of the vexations that hemmed in his freedom and his flight, he would say to me, half in earnest and half in play: ‘Tomorrow, the day you make a memorial, let it be in the shape of a lion rearing and roaring!’”

And Howayek turned to me, remarking:

“But Gibran, my friend, did not resemble the lion; he was nearer the lamb, in his gentleness and the tenderness of his heart!”