foreign clothes of a rich fabric and princely make, and wear them up and
down the streets, and how grocers' boys would turn back their heads to
look at me, as I went by. For I very well remembered staring at a man
myself, who was pointed out to me by my aunt one Sunday in Church, as
the person who had been in Stony Arabia, and passed through strange
adventures there, all of which with my own eyes I had read in the book
which he wrote, an arid-looking book in a pale yellow cover.

"See what big eyes he has," whispered my aunt, "they got so big, because
when he was almost dead with famishing in the desert, he all at once
caught sight of a date tree, with the ripe fruit hanging on it."

Upon this, I stared at him till I thought his eyes were really of an
uncommon size, and stuck out from his head like those of a lobster. I am
sure my own eyes must have magnified as I stared. When church was out, I
wanted my aunt to take me along and follow the traveler home. But she
said the constables would take us up, if we did; and so I never saw this
wonderful Arabian traveler again. But he long haunted me; and several
times I dreamt of him, and thought his great eyes were grown still
larger and rounder; and once I had a vision of the date tree.

In course of time, my thoughts became more and more prone to dwell upon
foreign things; and in a thousand ways I sought to gratify my tastes. We
had several pieces of furniture in the house, which had been brought
from Europe. These I examined again and again, wondering where the wood
grew; whether the workmen who made them still survived, and what they
could be doing with themselves now.

Then we had several oil-paintings and rare old engravings of my
father's, which he himself had bought in Paris, hanging up in the