It was a Mohammedan village, and this probably a Mohammedan wife, maintaining her rights against an unkind or petulant husband. Verily, we of the western world are far from the truth in the judgments we form about the domestic manners and intercourse of the Mohammedans, and especially their mode of treating their wives. We not only take it for granted that the Mohammedans believe their women have no souls, (which is not true,) but we suppose they have no rights, no privileges, and dare hardly look at their lords, much less speak to them, under fear of losing their heads. Now, all this is wide of the mark. The Mohammedan ladies have their rights, as well as our own fair ones, and know how to stand up for them--and the female tongue is fully as powerful an instrument in the East as it is in the West. Judging from what I used to hear when a boy about the Mohammedans, I should have expected to have seen this _fair one_ put in a sack and thrown in the river, or, as water is rather scarce here to be used for drowning _scolds_, I should at least have expected to have seen her head cut off, and her tongue nailed up in terror to others. But it was plain that the good lady was in no fear of such treatment; and the good people of the village, instead of coming to the relief of the man, were glad to keep out of harm's way; and the ruler of the town, if it had any, knew better than to intermeddle with other people's matters; and the man himself received a lesson which I hope may do him more good than it did me. "On that night could not the king sleep!" And so it was with me. Whether it was owing to the train of thinking which the strife of tongues occasioned; or whether that Angelo had made my tea too strong, which he is almost sure to do, for I can't get the notion out of his head that the stronger and the richer his dishes are, so much the better; or whether other and unknown causes tended to chase sleep from my eyes, I know not; but so it was, I could not sleep. And really it was worth remaining awake to look on the face of such a sky. We lay on the summit of a little hill; not a bush or a green leaf near us. We had a fair horizon, and one of the clearest skies that I ever saw. It seemed that I could see farther than usual into the deep abyss, over which the stars are scattered in wild, irregular, but beautiful confusion. I do not wonder that astronomy began in the East, and, admitting the very strong and general tendency of mankind to idolatry, I the less wonder that, in this eastern world, with such heavens nightly spread over them, there should have been so strong a tendency to the worship of the host of heaven. It has much more show of reason than the worship of stocks and stones, the work of men's hands.