malign grin widening on his furrowed face,--"Thou shalt learn
enough trash here to stock thee with idiot-songs for a century.
Thou shalt gather up such fragments of stupidity, as shall provide
thee with food for all the puling love-sick girls of a nation!
Dost thou write follies also? ... thou shalt not write them here,
thou shalt not even think them!--for here Sah-luma,--the great,
the unrivalled Sah-luma,--is sole Lord of the land of Poesy.
Poesy,--by all the gods!--I would the accursed art had never been
invented ... so might the world have been spared many long-drawn
nothings, enwoofed in obscure and distracting phraseology! ...
THOU a would-be Poet?--go to!--make brick, mend sandals, dig
entrenchments, fight for thy country,--and leave the idle
stringing of words, and the tinkling of rhyme, to children like
Sah-luma, who play with life instead of living it."

And with this, he hobbled off uneasily, grunting and grumbling as
he went, and waving his staff magisterially right and left to warn
the smiling maidens out of his way,--and once more Sah-luma's
laughter, clear and joyous, pealed through the vaulted vestibule.

"Poor Zabastes!" he said in a tone of good-humored tolerance--"He
has the most caustic wit of any man in Al-Kyris! He is a positive
marvel of perverseness and ill-humor, well worth the four hundred
golden pieces I pay him yearly for his task of being my scribe and
critic. Like all of us he must live, eat and wear decent
clothing,--and that his only literary skill lies in the abuse of
better men than himself is his misfortune, rather than his fault.
Yes! ... he is my paid Critic, paid to rail against me on all
occasions public or private, for the merriment of those who care
to listen to the mutterings of his discontent,--and, by the Sacred