When he dug a foot deep into the soil of his garden and set the

green seedling firm in the good earth, he never dreamed that it would burst forth in bounty and become a white canopy hung with a thousand stars, called — in other than the language of poetry — an apricot tree.

And one spring his apricot tree put forth leaves and filled with promising stars, each star rounding into a yellow fruit.

But his mouth never knew their sweetness, for he saw in his garden and its canopies no more than these white stars.

And he was driven from the land, and deprived of its bounty, and nothing remained to him but the clinging image, and the fragrance that intoxicates his senses every season, when the apricot trees blossom and the gardens become a dancing-floor for spring.

And today, ten years after, he still feels his cause — the cause of a tree that he planted and another ate; of a white canopy in whose shade strangers take their ease.

O you who feel what is in his soul, and know the secret of the two tears that swim in his eyes when, on

his evening walks, he comes to an orchard where the white blossoms have lit up on the apricot trees.

If you see her in the morning knocking gently at your door, to greet you with a smile charged with all the optimism of her ten years, and then hand you a bottle of the best her cow gives — know that she

is Bashira.

And if you see her an hour later, do not fail to know her by her black school smock, her shod feet, and her satchel bulging with books — for Bashira is a schoolgirl too.

Once she stood waiting for me while I emptied her bottle of milk; she leaned against

the wall and began reckoning something on her fingers. When I came back to her with the empty bottle she said: Isn't nine times seven sixty-three? I am going over the table of nines... And I stroked her head gently, and she took up the bottle and skipped from our house to our neighbors' house, with "nine times seven" still dancing on her lips.

I asked her once, as she wiped from her feet the dew of the garden grass at the door of our house: Are you doing well at school, Bashira?

She handed me the bottle and said, like one who scorns the question: Ask my teacher — I am first in my class... Yes, Bashira the milk-seller, first in her class.

She said this and slipped away with her bottle, light as a nimble goat; for she has no time to waste, and before her is a set of bottles awaiting distribution, and a set of houses that receive their morning to the knocking of Bashira, standing at doors still shut against the threads of dawn.

And I gaze after her a little and say: and why should she not be first? Did she not learn, before all the others, that life does not give without taking?

How wonderful is what a gentle touch can do! A lesson I learned from three dogs that surrounded me one night.

I was coming out of one of the shops on my way home.

And the night was blind, without a moon; as for the street lamps, they were too weak to scatter the desolation of the evening with its thickening gray clouds.

Suddenly the rain began to fall,