“You might imagine, my children,” he began “that having this small capital so happily furnished me by Providence in the short space of a single day, I would again venture upon a commercial undertaking. That would have been indeed my natural course; but you must remember that I could not, without great danger, enter the city I had just left, lest my able transactions should lead me into contact with those at whose expense they had been conducted. Further, I was in a strange country with no knowledge of my way and with nothing to guide me save the happy circumstance that I was still within the boundaries of our holy religion. Most of those I should meet would thus be True Believers, whose frailties I could better understand than those of the Kafir, and of whom therefore I could (under the all-powerful guidance of Heaven) more easily take advantage.
“Devoutly remembering the signal mercies shown to me by Allah in this last short day, I determined to follow the same course as I had when my good fortune came to me—to lie passive under the Mighty Hand directing me and to trust to luck.
“I took some sleep in the night beside my fire, but hardly had I awakened at dawn when I was aware of a group approaching me through the forest track. They were a party of a dozen or so, half of them on foot, half of them mounted; of no great consequence if one might judge by their clothing, which, my dear nephews, is in most occasions in life the signal by which we may know whether to revere men or to despise them. Both beasts and humans in this group were travel-stained as having come from some great distance.
“As I saw them before they saw me, I naturally took the precaution of creeping up behind them through the trees in order to overhear the object of their journey. It appeared that they were bound on pilgrimage to the shrine of a Most Holy Man, to obtain his oracle in a matter which concerned their miserable village.
“My mind was at once made up. I ran back by a circuitous course through the trees, came to a place ahead of their progress, and there, spreading my little mat upon the sward, I prostrated myself in prayer. Indeed, I was thus able to kill two birds with one stone, for I had not yet said those morning prayers of the True Believer which I had never omitted in all my life, save when I happened to be flying from justice and therefore deprived of leisure.
“As I heard them coming up behind me I raised my head and voice at once, and fell into a perfect ecstasy of worship, which did not fail to impress the simple mountaineers. They halted respect fully until I saw fit to terminate my conversation with the Most High. I pretended to be so absorbed in my contemplation of divine things as not to notice them: for to keep them waiting secured religious as well as worldly respect. They approached me with deference and even awe. I told them I was bound for the shrine of a Most Holy Man whose name I gave them. They were overjoyed to discover that they had a companion filled with the same sentiments as themselves.
“ ‘We also,’ said their leader, ‘are engaged upon the same sacred mission. For we have been informed by a messenger (whom we dispatched a month ago from our village) that the Saint will graciously receive us and give us a reply upon a doubtful matter of wild hedge-pigs which has greatly excited our tribe, whether they be pork or no.’
“I let them convey by chance phrases the direction we had to travel and the distance of our goal. I was delighted to discover that our way did not lie through the city, and that we might hope to reach the Holy One before night.
“The journey was tedious, passing over burnt land with but a few wretched villages upon the track; but by the late afternoon we could see far off, coloured by the declining rays of the sun, a small, white-domed building, the tomb of a great saint long dead, by the side of which a large group of tents and a considerable assembly lying out in the open round them cooking their evening meal, beasts of burden, and all the movement of a camp, showed us that we were reaching the term of our day’s journey.
“When we reached the camp I joined the thickest part of the throng, separating from the group with which I had been marching. I made my evening prayers in as conspicuous a place as possible, prolonged them prodigiously, the better to impress my new neighbours, and then lay down, uncertain what the course of the next day should be.
“It was revealed to me in a dream.
“In that dream there appeared a bright and beneficent Being who with one hand was relieving of his superfluous wealth an unconscious pilgrim to his left, and with the other was conferring precisely the same favour on another to his right. Each of the two pilgrims had his face turned away from the Blessed Genius thus engaged and seemed unconscious of the process to which he was subjected. The Glorious Visitant, without interrupting its occupation or ceasing with mechanical regularity to dip its hands into the pouches of its unwitting neighbours, looked upon me with the most benign expression, winked, and disappeared.
“I awoke. It was yet dark. I pondered until dawn what the revelation might mean. With the rising of the sun inner as well as outer light was bestowed upon me. I interpreted in the following fashion the vision that had thus been vouchsafed to me and the event proved me to have divined the right reading
