“‘Morbid!’” I repeated, somewhat indignantly. “And why _morbid_, I should like to know? A man takes his stand, as you and I do, outside of, and apart from, the circling, shifting mass of his fellow-creatures, and makes his own observations, uninfluenced by their clamour, their customs, their ridiculous prejudices and opinions, confiding those observations unreservedly to one who should, _ex officio_ indeed, be entirely free from the earthly trammels that cumber liberal discussion in general society, and he is to be called _morbid_, forsooth! It was only one of your ghastly jests, was it? Enough! I am satisfied. There can be no bone of contention—I mean no subject of dispute—between you and me—we have not the ghost of a reason—I mean the shadow of a cause—for disagreement. I confess my weakness: I own to a fatal tendency to digression. One thought leads to another, and they follow in a string, like wild geese, or heirs of entail, ‘_velut unda supervenit undam_.’ By the way, this very subject, the association of ideas, opens up a boundless field for speculation. But I refrain—I return to my Gourd—I am back in Nineveh with the prophet once more. Nineveh, in its imperial splendour, gorgeous in Eastern colouring, sublime with Eastern magnificence, glittering with Eastern decorations—solemn, gloomy, and gigantic; grand in the massive dignity of size, winged bulls hewn from the solid rock guard the long perspective of a thousand avenues, leading to palaces that rise, tier upon tier, into the glowing sky. Lavish profusion—marble, and bronze, and gold—gleams and dazzles and flashes in the streets. The palm-tree bends her graceful head earthward; the aloe aims her angry spikes at heaven; the camel, with meek appealing eyes, seems to protest against the bales of costly merchandise with which its back is piled; the white elephant in scarlet trappings, stolid and sagacious, stands patient, waiting for its lord; throngs of dusky, half-naked Asiatics pass to and fro along the baking causeways; loud bleatings of sheep, lowings of oxen, cries of parched, thirsty animals resound in the suburbs; while over all a Southern sun blazes down 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.’