For indeed, despite his felicity in cobbling, sewing, milking his goats and tarring his camels, there were many things that he did not like at all. He detested lying on the part of others, and separated himself from those of his adherents who cultivated a natural taste for mendacity, until they repented; he held the custom of usury in special abhorrence: “One dirhem of usury which a man eats, knowing it to be so, is more grievous than thirty-six fornications,” he declared. He also loathed dogs and pictures--“Angels will not enter a house containing a dog or pictures,” and “Every painter will be in hell,” he oracularly announced, but the reason for this outburst is obscure. Perhaps it was because Arabian art was notoriously bad--and then again, perhaps he was jealous of anything that, no matter how rude and primitive, was entirely beyond his comprehension. Once, during public prayers, he chanced to notice that his mantle was richly figured, and when he had ended he said: “Take away that mantle, for verily it hath distracted me in my prayers, and bring me a common one”; and on another similar occasion he threw off a silken robe in disgust, saying, “Such stuff it doth not become the pious to wear.” He wore a golden ring until he noticed that all the people were beginning to follow his example, whereupon he went into the pulpit, pulled the ring off with the words, “By the Lord I will not wear this ring ever again,” and then prohibited the use of such adornments. A friend who had sent him a present in the form of a steaming dinner was much chagrined when it was returned uneaten and even untouched by his fingers--for he “used to eat with his thumb and his two forefingers,” and, “after he had finished eating, he licked his blessed fingers: first the middle one, then the prayer-finger, and last the thumb”--but he was pacified when the Prophet explained that he had not tasted it because onions had been cooked with the food; for Gabriel, he went on to say, strenuously objected to the odor of both onions and garlic. Furthermore, he abstained from tasting lizards, for he feared that they were descended, by some inexplicable metempsychosis, from a certain tribe of Israel. He commonly reclined during his meals, though sometimes “he would sit on his left leg, posting up the right; and if he was very hungry, he would sit down altogether and post up both legs.”