At eight the next morning we rode to Wilensi. As we approached it all the wayfarers and villagers inquired Hibernically if we were the party that had been put to death by the Amir of Harar. Loud congratulations and shouts of joy awaited our arrival. The Kalendar was in a paroxysm of delight: both Shehrazade and Deenarzade were affected with giggling and what might be blushing. We reviewed our property and found that the One- eyed had been a faithful steward, so faithful indeed, that he had well nigh starved the two women. Presently appeared the Gerad and his sons bringing with them my books; the former was at once invested with a gaudy Abyssinian Tobe of many colours, in which he sallied forth from the cottage the admired of all admirers. The pretty wife Sudiyah and the good Khayrah were made happy by sundry gifts of huge Birmingham ear-rings, brooches and bracelets, scissors, needles, and thread. The evening as usual ended in a feast. "We halted a week at Wilensi to feed,--in truth my companions had been faring lentenly at Harar,--and to lay in stock and strength for the long desert march before us. A Somali was despatched to the city under orders to load an ass with onions, tobacco, spices, wooden platters, and Karanji [2], which our penniless condition had prevented our purchasing. I spent the time collecting a vocabulary of the Harari tongue under the auspices of Mad Said and All the poet, a Somali educated at the Alma Mater. He was a small black man, long-headed and long-backed, with remarkably prominent eyes, a bulging brow, nose pertly turned up, and lean jaws almost unconscious of beard. He knew the Arabic, Somali, Galla, and Harari languages, and his acuteness was such, that I found no difficulty in what usually proves the hardest task,--extracting the grammatical forms. "A poet, the son of a Poet," to use his own phrase, he evinced a Horatian respect for the beverage which bards love, and his discourse, whenever it strayed from the line of grammar, savoured of over reverence for the goddess whom Pagans associated with Bacchus and Ceres. He was also a patriot and a Tyrtaeus. No clan ever attacked his Girhis without smarting under terrible sarcasms, and his sneers at the young warriors for want of ardour in resisting Gudabirsi encroachments, were quoted as models of the "withering." Stimulated by the present of a Tobe, he composed a song in honor of the pilgrim: I will offer a literal translation of the exordium, though sentient of the fact that modesty shrinks from such quotations. "Formerly, my sire and self held ourselves songsters: Only to day, however, I really begin to sing. At the order of Abdullah, Allah sent, my tongue is loosed, The son of the Kuraysh by a thousand generations, He hath visited Audal, and Sahil and Adari [3]; A hundred of his ships float on the sea; His intellect," &c. &c. &c.