第33章

Seeing this, Israel cried from the back of the crowd, "I will give twenty dollars to buy him the girl's liberty," and straightway another and another offered like sums for the same purpose until the amount of the last bid had been reached, and the slave-master took it, and the girl was free.

Then the poor negro, still holding his daughter by the hand, came to Israel, with the tears dripping down his black cheeks, and said in his broken way: "The blessing of Allah upon you, white brother, and if you have a child of your own may you never lose her, but may Allah favour her and let you keep her with you always!"That blessing of the old black man was more than Israel could bear, and, facing about before hearing the last of it, he turned down the dark arcade that descends into the old town as into a vault, and having crossed the markets, he came upon the second of the three sights that were to smite out of his heart his pride towards God.A man in a blue tunic girded with a red sash, and with a red cotton handkerchief tied about his head, was driving a donkey laden with trunks of light trees cut into short lengths to lie over its panniers.He was clearly a Spanish woodseller and he had the weary, averted, and downcast look of a race that is despised and kept under.

His donkey was a bony creature, with raw places on its flank and shoulders where its hide had been worn by the friction of its burdens.He drove it slowly; crying "Arrah!" to it in the tongue of its own country, and not beating it cruelly.

At the bottom of the arcade there was an open place where a foul ditch was crossed by a rickety bridge.Coming to this the man hesitated a moment, as if doubtful whether to drive his donkey over it or to make the beast trudge through the water.Concluding to cross the bridge, he cried "Arrah!" again, and drove the donkey forward with one blow of his stick.But when the donkey was in the middle of it, the rotten thing gave way, and the beast and its burden fell into the ditch.The donkey's legs were broken, and when a throng of Arabs, who gathered at the Spaniard's cry, had cut away its panniers and dragged it out of the water on to the paving-stones of the street, the film covered its eyes, and in a moment it was dead.

At that the man knelt down beside it, and patted it on its neck, and called on it by its name, as if unwilling to believe that it was gone.

And while the Arabs laughed at him for doing so--for none seemed to pity him--a slatternly girl of sixteen or seventeen came scudding down the arcade, and pushed her way through the crowd until she stood where the dead ass lay with the man kneeling beside it.