Page:On the Desert - Recent Events in Egypt.djvu/88

74 even in the lowest degree of worldly estate. He had had among his patients a descendant of the great Saladin, who fought with Richard Cœur de Lion; a man who was blind, and whom he restored to sight by removing a cataract from his eye, and who was yet too poor to buy himself a pair of spectacles; and yet neither his poverty nor his rags could make him forget the blood that flowed in his veins. No scion of a royal house could be more proud of his kingly birth. In other cases he had known emirs who were regular tramps. One such used to come around to beg, mounted on a brood mare worth a hundred and fifty pounds! He had a servant with him, whom he sent in to prefer his request for alms, and who pleaded the high rank of his master as a reason why he could not work. To judge from the tone of both master and servant, it was an honor conferred on the giver, that he might bestow his charity on one of such long and proud descent.

Fearing lest a marriage so concluded might not be always happy, our next question was "Suppose the woman who is thus married without her consent, does not like the husband that has been given her, how is she to get rid of him? Is there any mode of relief?"

The old man shook his head as he answered: "It is not an easy matter. When a woman is married, she is in the power of her husband. If he gets tired of her, he has but to tell her that she is divorced, and she goes back to her father's house. He does not even give her a writing of divorcement, as Moses commanded the Hebrews."

This seemed to place the advantage all on one side. But pressing the matter a little further, we found that among the Arabs, as everywhere else in the world, there is such a thing as a woman's revenge, and that if her lord is too much of a tyrant, she can at least make him sit uneasy on his throne. If she is intent on seeking relief from her