The narrowness of his means at Medina limited his gluttonous desires for a time, but his rapid successes soon enabled him to feast upon delectable dainties. He was very fond of sweetmeats, honey, cucumbers and ripe dates (“When he ate fresh dates he would keep such as were bad in his hand”) and he eyed the pumpkin with particular favor. One of his servants, gazing abstractedly at some pumpkins one day, after Mohammed’s death, was overheard saying “Dear little plant, how the Prophet loved thee!” Like a true Arab, he preferred mutton to all other flesh. “I once slew a kid and dressed it,” narrated a Medinan. “The Prophet asked me for the forequarter and I gave it to him. ‘Give me another,’ he said; and I gave him the second. Then he asked for a third. ‘O Prophet!’ I replied, ‘there are but two forequarters to a kid.’” The meal that he relished with most gusto, however, was “a mess of bread cooked with meat, and a dish of dates dressed with butter and milk.” He had a predilection for several wells around Medina whose waters, he said, were both “cold and sweet,” and, after he drank, he sometimes bathed in them or invoked a blessing on their contents by spitting into them. Close-fisted and frugal most of the time, he readily loosed his purse-strings when he saw something whose appeal was irresistible. He once paid about twenty camels for a single dress, and also gave eight golden pieces for a mantle. At bedtime he regularly put antimony on his eyelids, “saying that it made the sight more piercing, and caused the hair to grow”; he had a crystal goblet with silver trimmings, a copper vase for his baths, and an ivory comb; but perhaps his chief fancy inclined toward perfumes. “We always used to know when Mohammed had issued forth from his chamber by the sweet perfume that filled the air,” one of his servants testified. He indulged without stint in musk and ambergris, and he burned camphor on odiferous wood so that he might enjoy the smell. With her customary acumen, Ayesha put the gist of the matter into one pithy sentence when she said: “The Prophet loved three things--women, scents, and food; he had his heart’s desire of the first two, but not of the last.” In fact, Mohammed himself argued that these two innocuous diversions intensified the ecstasy of his prayers. II