Now the Hajji bore a striking personal resemblance to Hudibras, and like that hero, regarded discretion as being the better part of valour. Since the melancholy disaster at Goongoonteh, he had encumbered himself with a musket and a modicum of cartridges; but even by his warmest admirers it must be confessed that there had never in his demeanour been observed the slightest indication of a design to throw himself away by rash exposure. Entertaining the highest respect for himself, the prudent son of Iran was rarely heard to speak of Hajji Abdallah save in the respectful third person singular. The words of Ibrahim Shehem had sunk deep into his soul, and after the affair of the venison, it was not a little diverting to hear him, in his wonted croaking accents, apostrophise the folly and the infatuation which had prompted him to brave the wilds of unexplored Africa. "Hajji Abdallah was never taxed with lack of common sense," he exclaimed musingly in self-reproach. "Allah knows there be many greater blockheads in this sublunary world than his servant the Hajji. Is it not wonderful that the chief cook to Khwajah Mohammad Rahim Khan Shirazi, and master, too, of recipes for no fewer than nine-and-thirty pilaos, should have proven himself such an ass, such a son of a burnt father, as voluntarily to get in the way of abuse for refusing to _kabab_ unhallowed meat which died without the knife or the Bismillah; and, worse still, in the way of having his own throat divided every minute of each day and night by these bloodthirsty infidels? `_La houl willah koowut illah billah ali ul-azeem_,' `there is no power nor virtue save in God.' What true believer in the fair province of Kurman would ever have suspected Hajji Abdallah of bringing his beard to so vile a market?" Volume One, Chapter XXXI. MENACE OF THE DAR MUDAITO. MOOLU ZUGHIR, AND BURDUDDA.