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His time and all that he possessed was entirely at the disposition of the señores. The choice was embarrassing. But at last one rope-sandalled hero was selected, and the trio set off into the night between the great rubble walls. The most of their luggage had been left to go to Mahon by mule pannier on the morrow. They only took one small box with them, slung by a strap over Sadi's shoulders.
The Gulistan of Sadi, which was the next book issued, is best known in England from the translations by James Ross and Edward B. Eastwick . Sadi's aim was to make "a garden of roses whose leaves the rude hand of the blast of Autumn could not affect." "The very brambles and rubbish of this book," says an ancient enthusiastic admirer, "are of the nature of ambergris."
The earliest direct attempt we know of, with all the old argument, pro and con, is thus given in Sadi's "Gulistan." Among a gang of thieves, who had been very hardly taken, "there happened to be a lad whose rising bloom of youth was just matured. One of the viziers kissed the foot of the king's throne, assumed a look of intercession, and said,
Yusef had defended the cause of a widow whom Sadi had tried to defraud; and Sadi's dishonesty being found out, he had been punished with stripes, which he had but too well deserved. Therefore did he seek to ruin the man who had brought just punishment on him, therefore he resolved to destroy Yusef by inducing his Arab comrades to leave him to die in the desert.
My Persian friends would quote at length from Sadi's Gulistan or Rose Garden, and go into raptures over its beauty. Below the consulate was a landing-place, and when we were ready to leave we would go down to the river-bank preceded by our servants carrying lanterns. They would call "Abu bellam" until a boat appeared. The term "abu" always amused me. Its literal meaning is "father."
Men treasured the scraps of Sadi's writing "as if they were gold leaf," and The Gulistan has attained a popularity in the East "which has never been reached in this Western world." The school-boy lisps his first lessons in it, the pundit quotes it, and hosts of its sayings have become proverbial.
As I went down the gang-plank and ranged up against Sadi's elbow, walking with him past the wine casks and other litter on Palma quay, it seemed to me that after all I should have to accept the risk and recruit this companion's aid. But such a decision was far too momentous to be hurriedly jumped at. The Recipe was safely locked in the yellow-green film.
You see, Sadi's mother was half Arab, half Portuguese; his father was all Portuguese jail-bird Portuguese; his youth had been spent in Marquez, which is on Delagoa Bay; and these things do not breed immaculate honesty calculated to stand every strain. I may have wronged Sadi. As I say, he never failed me.
While the roses shook their odours over the garden, they talked of Sadi's roses, Jami's "Aromatic herbs," and "Trees of Liberality," and the volume Persian Portraits, which Arbuthnot, assisted by Edward Rehatsek, was at the moment preparing for the press. Among the objects at Mr.
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