Having made the necessary preparations, the old man purchased a vessel, which he manned with Hindoo sailors, for the best of all possible reasons, because no other were to be had. The vessel was a large clumsy boat, carrying about sixty tons, with no deck, save a kind of poop, under which there was one small cabin. She was manned by fifteen native seaman. Everything being put on board, the merchant Sam, with his son Eiz-ood-Deen, set sail from Surat with a favourable breeze. The old man’s heart bounded as he quitted those shores which had been the place of his exile for years, and although he had filled his coffers with money in this strange land, his predilection for that of his birth had never been once stifled; it was still glowing. He was anxious to lay his bones among those of his forefathers, and he tried to rouse the spirits of his son to the same level of gratification with his own; but the image of death was too vividly impressed upon the mind of Eiz-ood-Deen to be so readily effaced. He could not banish it. It seemed as if a fiery hand had seared it upon his brain with an impress so deep and glowing that the finger of death only could obliterate the tracing. His heart sickened when he reverted to the repelling reality. “Nay, my son,” said the glad father, “you seem as if you grieved at a parent’s joy. Why this gloom? Is there no other country upon the globe’s wide surface which can yield us as glad a home as that which we have quitted. Why do you repine? What have you relinquished? Were we not living among communities which despised our religion, and held us unfit to be admitted to the privileges of social intercourse? Were we not rather tolerated than welcomed by those idolators whom our religion has taught us to despise?” “Then why, my father, have you made their country your home for so many years? They admitted the exile among them, and surely those people are not to be despised who received him whom his own countrymen had abandoned. But you mistake the cause of my sorrow. I grieve not at quitting the land of my father’s exile; on the contrary, I rejoice at it: but there are griefs which weigh heavy on my heart, and never shall I remember the city which we have quitted but with a pang that must lacerate my bosom.” The merchant was astonished. Absorbed in the pursuits of trade, he had allowed his son to have so much his own way, that he knew little or nothing of his pursuits, and had been altogether ignorant of his acquaintance with the beautiful Parsee; he was, therefore, not a little surprised when Eiz-ood-Deen related to him his attachment towards the Guebre’s daughter and the lamentable issue of it.