Page:Islam, Turkey, and Armenia, and How They Happened.djvu/18

12 overflowed the neighboring lands; the palace of the Persian monarch shook to its foundation, several of its towers falling down, and the Judge of Persia saw in his dream a ferocious camel conquered by an Arabian courser.

2. The Childhood of Mohamet. His father died either before or shortly after his birth and the child when two months old was given by his relatives, after the fashion of the land, to a Bedouin nurse to be fostered in genuine desert life. On their journey from the city of Mecca to the tent of the nurse, the tradition says the animal which bore the babe, becoming endowed with speech, proclaimed aloud that it bore on its back the greatest of the Prophets and the favorite of Allah. The flocks of sheep and cattle bowed to him as he passed by, and the moon stooped towards him when he was gazing at it in his cradle.

He could stand alone, the tradition continues to say, when three months old; run abroad when seven; at eight months he could speak so intelligibly and fluently as to astonish all his hearers. At the age of three years, when he was playing in the field with the children of the nurse, two bright angels appeared before them, and taking hold of Mohamet laid him gently upon the ground, and opened his breast without causing any pain, and taking forth his heart washed it with snow from all impurities originated from Adam's sin, and after filling it with faith and wisdom and prophetic light replaced it in his bosom. Mohamet in his later life used to show the crescent-shaped scar of that angelic operation to his followers,