Finding Al Sunh at an inconvenient distance from the Great Mosque, where, as in the time of Mahomet, the affairs of the kingdom continued to be transacted, he transferred his residence, and with it the Treasury, thither. The Exchequer of Islam was in those days but a simple one. It needed neither guard nor office of account. The tithes were given to the poor, or spent on equipage and arms. The spoil of war, and gold and silver from the mines,[192] or elsewhere, were all distributed as soon as received, or on the following morning.[193] All shared alike, the recent convert and the veteran, male and female, bond and free. As a claimant on the Moslem treasury, every believing Arab was his brother’s equal. When urged to recognise precedence in the faith as a ground of preference, he would reply, ‘That is for the Lord. He will fulfil the reward of such as have excelled, in the world to come. These gifts are but an accident of the present life.’ After his death, Omar had the treasury opened; and they found therein but a solitary golden piece, which had slipped out of the bags; so they lifted up their voices and wept, and blessed his memory. His conscience troubled him for having taken even what he did by way of stipend from the people’s money; on his death-bed, therefore, he gave command that certain lands, his private property, should be sold, and a sum equal to all that he had received refunded. [Sidenote: Mild and gentle disposition.] In disposition Abu Bekr was singularly mild and gentle. Omar used to say that there was no man for whom the people would more readily have laid down their life. They gave him the sobriquet of ‘the Sighing,’ because of his tender-heartedness. Excepting the solitary case in which he committed a traitor-brigand to the flames, no single act of cruelty stands against him; and for that he expressed his sorrow. It was one of the three things, he used to say, which he would wish undone. The others were, that he had pardoned Asháth, who deserved death; and that when he transferred Khâlid to Syria, he had not at the same time sent Omar to Irâc. ‘Then,’ said he, ‘I should have stretched out mine arms, both the right and the left, in the ways of the Lord.’[194] [Sidenote: His wives and family.]