Page:Whyte-Melville--Bones and I.djvu/64

 with scorching fury, and an east wind off the Desert comes blustering in, hot and stifling, like a blast from hell.

"So the prophet is 'exceeding glad of his Gourd.' He will rest in its shade; he will look pitifully on the broiling passers-by; he will hug himself in that sense of comfort which human nature, alas! is too apt to experience from the very fact that others are in a worse condition than its own; but even while he thus rejoices, the worm has done its work—the Gourd is withered up, the sirocco suffocates his lungs, the sun beats on his head, and, like the rest of us when we lose that which we choose to consider the one thing essential to our happiness, he shows the white feather on the spot, and says, 'It is better for me to die than to live.'

"Death never seems to come for those who wish it—though perhaps if the Great