I raised my eyes. Two mastic bushes and arbutus-trees were on the right and left of the path. From each bush the muzzles of three or four guns protruded. A voice cried in Greek: “Seat yourselves on the ground!” This operation was exceedingly easy for me, as my knees weakened under me. But I consoled myself with the thought that Ajax, Agamemnon, and the hot-headed Achilles, if they found themselves in a like position, would not have refused the seat offered them.

The guns were lowered toward us. I expected to see them pushed out so far that their muzzles would touch each other over our heads. It was not that I was afraid; but I had never before realized the extraordinary length of Greek guns. The whole arsenal marched out into the path, showing the owner of each.The only difference which exists between devils and brigands, is that devils are less black than one expects, and brigands more squalid than one supposes. The eight scoundrels who surrounded us were so foul, that I would have preferred to give them my money with pinchers. One could imagine that their bonnets might once have been red; but lye itself could never have found the original shade of their coats. All the rocks of the kingdom had contributed to the color of their percale skirts, and their vests bore a specimen of the different soils upon which they had reposed What she said to me on the way, and what I replied, left no more..

Their hands, their faces, and even their mustaches were of a reddish gray like the dirt which they had on their clothes. Every animal colors itself like the house or land it inhabits: the foxes of Greenland are like the snow; lions, the color of the desert; partridges, like the ground; the Greek brigands, the color of the paths.The chief of the little band who had taken us prisoners, was not distinguished by outward sign. Possibly his face, his hands, his clothes, were richer in dirt than those of his comrades. He bent over us from his great height, and examined us so closely, that I almost felt the touch of his e. You would have thought him a tiger who smelled his prey before devouring it. When his curiosity was satisfied, he said to Dimitri: “Empty thy pockets!” Dimitri did not make him repeat it the second time. He threw down, at his feet, a knife, a bag of tobacco, and three Mexican piastres, which made a sum of sixteen francs.
 

IN SCHOOL, we used to play a game called _Sherjangi_, or "Battle of the Poems.?The Farsi teacher moderated it and it went something like this: You recited a verse from a poem and your opponent had sixty seconds to reply with a verse that began with the same letter that ended yours. Everyone in my class wanted me on their team, because by the time I was eleven, I could recite dozens of verses from Khayyam, H?fez, or Rumi's famous _Masnawi_. One time, I took on the whole class and won. I told Baba about it later that night, but he just nodded, muttered, "Good.?
 

That was how I escaped my father's aloofness, in my dead mother's books. That and Hassan, of course. I read everything, Rumi, H?fez, Saadi, Victor Hugo, Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Ian Fleming. When I had finished my mother's books--not the boring history ones, I was never much into those, but the novels, the epics--I started spending my allowance on books. I bought one a week from the bookstore near Cinema Park, and stored them in cardboard boxes when I ran out of shelf room.
Of course, marrying a poet was one thing, but fathering a son who preferred burying his face in poetry books to hunting... well, that wasn't how Baba had envisioned it, I suppose. Real men didn't read poetry--and God forbid they should ever write it! Real men--real boys--played soccer just as Baba had when he had been young. Now _that_ was something to be passionate about. In 1970, Baba took a break from the construction of the orphanage and flew to Tehran for a month to watch the World Cup games on television, since at the time Afghanistan didn't have TVs yet Baba lifted his head from the pages flapping in the breeze..

He signed me up for soccer teams to stir the same passion in me. But I was pathetic, a blundering liability to my own team, always in the way of an opportune pass or unwittingly blocking an open lane. I shambled about the field on scraggy legs, squalled for passes that never came my way. And the harder I tried, waving my arms over my head frantically and screeching, "I'm open! I'm open!?the more I went ignored. But Baba wouldn't give up. When it became abundantly clear that I hadn't inherited a shred of his athletic talents, he settled for trying to turn me into a passionate spectator. Certainly I could manage that, couldn't I? I faked interest for as long as possible. I cheered with him when Kabul's team scored against Kandahar and yelped insults at the referee when he called a penalty against our team. But Baba sensed my lack of genuine interest and resigned himself to the bleak fact that his son was never going to either.
 

I remember one time Baba took me to the yearly _Buzkashi_ tournament that took place on the first day of spring, New Year's Day. Buzkashi was, and still is, Afghanistan's national passion. A _chapandaz_, a highly skilled horseman usually patronized by rich aficionados, has to snatch a goat or cattle carcass from the midst of a melee, carry that carcass with him around the stadium at full gallop, and drop it in a scoring circle while a team of other _chapandaz_ chases him and does everything in its power--kick, claw, whip, punch--to snatch the carcass from him. That day, the crowd roared with excitement as the horsemen on the field bellowed their battle cries and jostled for the carcass in a cloud of dust. The earth trembled with the clatter of hooves. We watched from the upper bleachers as riders pounded past us at full gallop, yipping and yelling, foam flying from their horses?mouths.

But Bascom was a fated man and he escaped. Once, it is true, a bright mindless beetle of machinery, which had no thought for fated men, had knocked him down and skinned and bruised him; again, an uninstructed wheel had passed across the soft toe-end of his shoe and held him prisoner, as if he were merely some average son of destiny — but he escaped. He escaped because he was a fated man and because the providence which guides the steps of children and the blind was kind to him; and because this same policeman whose simian upper lip had once been thick and twisted with its curses had long since run the scale from anger to wild fury, and thence to madness and despair and resignation, and had now come to have a motherly affection for this stray sheep.

kept his eye peeled for its appearance every morning, or, failing this, at once shrilled hard upon his whistle when he heard the well-known howl of terror and surprise, plunged to the centre of the stalled traffic snarl, plucked Bascom out to safety under curse and shout and scream of brake, and marched him tenderly to the curb, gripping his brawny hand around the old man’s arm, feeling his joints, testing his bones, massaging anxiously his sinewy carcass, and calling him “bud”— although Bascom was old enough to be his grandfather. “Are you all right, bud? You’re not hurt, are you, bud? Are you O.K.?”— to which Bascom, if his shock and terror had been great, could make no answer for a moment save to pant hoarsely and to howl loudly and huskily from time to time As he uttered these words he took a book from one of the shelves., “Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!”

At length, becoming more coherent, if not more calm, he would launch into an ecclesiastical indictment of motor cars and their drivers delivered in a high, howling, and husky voice that suggested the pronouncements of a prophet from a mountain. This voice had a quality of strange remoteness and, once heard, would never be forgotten. It actually had a howling note in it, and carried to great distances, and yet it was not loud: it was very much as if Mr. Bascom Pentland were standing on a mountain and shouting to someone in a quiet valley below — the sounds came to one plainly but as if from a great distance, and it was full of a husky, unearthly passion. It was really an ecclesiastical voice, the voice of a great preacher; one felt that it should be heard in churches, which was exactly where it once was heard, for Bascom had at various times and with, in the course of his long and remarkable life, professed and preached the faith of the Episcopalians, the Presbyterians, the Methodists, the Baptists, and the Unitarians.

Quite often, in fact, as now, when he had narrowly escaped disaster in the streets, Bascom still preached from the corner: as soon as he recovered somewhat from his shock, he would launch forth into a sermon of eloquent invective against any driver of motor cars within hearing, and if any of them entered the fray, as sometimes happened, a very interesting performance occurred.“What happened to YOU?” the motorist might bitterly remark. “Do the keepers know you’re out?”Mr. Pentland would thereupon retort with an eloquent harangue, beginning with a few well-chosen quotations from the more violent prophets of the Old Testament, a few predictions of death, destruction and damnation for the owners of motor cars, and a few apt references to Days of Judgment and Reckoning, Chariots of Moloch, and Beasts of the Apocalypse.“Oh, for God’s sake!” the exasperated motorist might reply. “Are you BLIND? Where do you think you are? In a cow-pasture? Can’t you read the signals? Didn’t you see the cop put his hand up? Don’t you know when it says to ‘Stop’ or ‘Go’? Did you ever hear of the traffic law?”
 

and in the same bright weather, the same remarkable journey, cannot but think of it with a sweet and tender regret. Where is the road now, and its merry incidents of life? Is there no Chelsea or Greenwich for the old honest pimple-nosed coachmen? I wonder where are they, those good fellows? Is old Weller alive or dead? and the waiters, yea, and the inns at which they waited, and the cold rounds of beef inside, and the stunted ostler, with his blue nose and clinking pail, where is he, and where is his generation? To those great geniuses now in petticoats, who shall write novels for the beloved reader’s children, these men and things will be as much legend and history as Nineveh, or Coeur de Lion, or Jack Sheppard.

For them stage-coaches will have become romances —a team of four bays as fabulous as Bucephalus or Black Bess. Ah, how their coats shone, as the stable-men pulled their clothes off, and away they went—ah, how their tails shook, as with smoking sides at the stage’s end they demurely walked away into the inn-yard. Alas! we shall never hear the horn sing at midnight, or see the pike-gates fly open any more. Whither, however, is the light four-inside Trafalgar coach carrying us? Let us be 
Miss Rebecca Sharp to Miss Amelia Sedley, Russell Square, London All that day Jos never came. But Amelia had no fear about this; for the little schemer had actually sent away the page, . (Free.—Pitt Crawley.)
 

MY DEAREST, SWEETEST AMELIA, With what mingled joy and sorrow do I take up the pen to write to my dearest friend! Oh, what a change between to-day and yesterday! Now I am friendless and alone; yesterday I was at home, in the sweet company of a sister, whom I shall ever, ever cherish! I will not tell you in what tears and sadness I passed the fatal night in which I separated from you. YOU went on Tuesday to joy and happiness, with your mother and your devoted young soldier by your side; and I thought of you all night, dancing at the Perkins’s, the prettiest, I am sure, of all the young ladies at the Ball. I was brought by the groom in the old carriage to Sir Pitt Crawley’s town house, where, after John the groom had behaved most rudely and insolently to me (alas! ’twas safe to insult poverty and misfortune!), I was given over to Sir P.’s care, and made to pass the night in an old gloomy bed, and by the side of a horrid gloomy old charwoman, who keeps the house. I did not sleep one single wink the whole night. Sir Pitt is not what we silly girls, when we used to read Cecilia at Chiswickmust have been.

Anything, indeed, less like Lord Orville cannot be imagined. Fancy an old, stumpy, short, vulgar, and very dirty man, in old clothes and shabby old gaiters, who smokes a horrid pipe, and cooks his own horrid supper in a saucepan. He speaks with a country accent, and swore a great deal at the old charwoman, at the hackney coachman who drove us to the inn where the coach went from, and on which I made the journey outside for the greater part of the way. I was awakened at daybreak by the charwoman, and having arrived at the inn, was at first placed inside the coach. But, when we got to a place called Leakington, where the rain began to fall very heavily—will you believe it?—I was forced to come outside; for Sir Pitt is a proprietor of the coach, and as a passenger came at Mudbury, who wanted an inside place, I was obliged to go outside in the rain, where, however, a young gentleman from Cambridge College sheltered me very kindly in one of his several great coats.

The one irreconcilable member of the family was the elder daughter, Lucia. She was the oldest child, so she had her own way; she was pretty, so she had always been petted; she was twenty, so she knew everything that she thought worth knowing. She had long before reconstructed the world (in her own mind) just as it should be, from the stand-point that it ought to exist solely for her benefit. Not bad-tempered, on the contrary, cheerful and full of high spirits, she was nevertheless in perpetual protest{10} against everything that was not exactly as she would have it, and not all the manners that careful breeding could impart could restrain the unconscious insolence peculiar to young and self-satisfied natures.

She would laugh loudly at table at Mrs. Hayn’s way of serving an omelet, tell Mrs. Hayn’s husband that his Sunday coat looked “so funny,” express her mind freely, before the whole household, at the horrid way in which the half-grown Hayn boys wore their hair, and had no hesitation in telling Philip Hayn, two years her senior, that when he came in from the field in his brown flannel shirt and gray felt hat he looked like an utter guy. But the Hayns were human, and, between pity and admiration, humanity long ago resolved to endure anything from a girl—if she is pretty¡@As Philip was making his speech, an immense banging of drums and blowing of trumpets arose from the balcony of the Ringwood Arms, and a something resembling the song of triumph called..

Slowly the Hayns came to like their boarders; more slowly, but just as surely, the Tramlays learned to like their hosts. Mutual respect began at the extremes of both families. Mrs. Tramlay, being a mother and a housekeeper, became so interested in the feminine half of the family’s head that she ceased to criticise her husband’s interest in the old farmer. The Tramlay children wondered at, and then admired, the wisdom and skill of their country companions in matters not understood by city children. Last of all, Lucia found herself heartily respecting the farmer’s son, and forgetting his uncouth dress and his awkwardness of manner in her wonder at his general courtesy, and his superior knowledge in some directions where she supposed she had gone as far as possible.

She had gone through a finishing-school{11} of the most approved New York type, yet Philip knew more of languages and history and science than she, when they chanced—never through her fault—to converse on such dry subjects; he knew more flowers than she had ever seen in a florist’s shop in the city; and once when she had attempted to decorate the rather bare walls of the farm-house parlor he corrected her taste with a skill which she was obliged to admit. There was nothing strange about it, except to Lucia; for city seminaries and country high schools use the same text-books, and magazines and newspapers that give attention to home decorations go everywhere; nevertheless, it seemed to Lucia that she had discovered a new order of being, and by the time she had been at Hayn Farm a month she found herself occasionally surprised into treating Philip almost as if he were.