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Perhaps who knows so positive a recognition of our estate as a definite class of the community, might lead to the long desiderated establishment of a lay convent, somewhat similar to the béguinages of Flanders, though less ostensibly subject to religious law a convent where single gentlewomen might unite together in their meals and devotions, under the government of a code of laws set forth in their tabby-bound Koran.

We cannot dwell here on his educational and moral reforms, his earnest efforts to enforce the teaching of the Koran, which was his guide in his public and private life. His beneficent intentions were all to be frustrated by the ambition of a European nation which was to signally fail, not in the work of conquering Abd-el-Kader, but in turning her conquest to good account.

"Brother of vultures didst thou go forth; brother of eagles dost thou return," she said. "Eat, drink, in the house of thy child and its mother." "Shall the unforgiven eat or drink?" he asked, and he rocked his body to and fro, like one who chants the Koran in a corner of El Azhar, forgetting and forgotten.

An old mollah taught me to read and write and repeat the verses of the Koran and I was as much advanced as any boy under his charge but he disliked me very much for reasons which I never could understand, and was eternally giving me the slipper.

This sharing of tobacco seemed to establish almost an amicable Free Masonry between them and the Jannati Shahr men. All sat and smoked in what seemed a friendly silence. The slave-girls silently departed. Others came with huge, silver trays graven with Koran verses.

"We weren't," Tertius broke in, "but there was another row between Gul Sher Khan and Rutton Singh. Our Jemadar said he was quite right that no Sikh living could stalk worth a damn; and that Koran Sahib had better take out the Pathans, who understood that kind of mountain work.

It looked as though earth and heaven had been steeped in blood; and, fresh as John was from the sight of the dead driver, his ears yet tingling with the tale of Bronker's Spruit, it is not to be wondered at that the suggestive sight oppressed him, seated in that lonely waste, with no company except the melancholy "kakara-kakara" of an old black koran hidden away somewhere in the grass.

Hyrtl, in his "Thesis on the Rarer Old Anatomists," says that "the Arabs paid very little attention to anatomy, and, of course, because of the prohibition in the Koran, added nothing to it. Whatever they knew they took from the Greeks, and especially Galen. Not only did they not add anything new to this, but they even lost sight of much that was important in the older authors.

Under the reign of the Ommiades, the studies of the Moslems were confined to the interpretation of the Koran, and the eloquence and poetry of their native tongue.

Caillié says: "The Mandingoes would rather go without food part of the day than work in the fields; they pretend that labour would take off their attention to the Koran, which is a very specious excuse for laziness." Like most people in Central Africa, all their hard work is done by the poor slaves.