"Her beauty," he resumed, "is a miracle, and her birth was also a miracle; hence sho was born for great purposes, and may yet be a source of delight to him who wears the sword of Omar, our Lord the Sultan Abdul Medjid--who can tell? She was born of my first wife, Tsha; when she was old, stricken in years, and hopelessly barren, on seeing a hen feed her chickens one day, her heart was moved; she wept and prayed the holy Prophet to give her a little child in her old age, whereupon she had Basilia in the fulness of time; so thus I tell thee, she was born for great things. Enough, enough, Osman Rioni, go thy ways, for thou art very poor." "True, father," said I, while my heart became chilled with despair; "I am poor, and my brothers Selim and Karolyi are also poor, for we have no inheritance but the name of our father, and what we can wrench in combat from the enemies of our country, and for every meal of food we have to fight the convoys of the Russ on the mountain, or the wild beasts in the forest; but a time is at hand when I shall have all my father's patrimony again, when the forts of the Kuban shall lie in ruins by its shore, while the wolf shall batten on the bones of their defenders. A time shall come when I may ride from the grassy steppes of Marinskoi to the reedy flow of the Kisselbash River, lord of all the land my father bequeathed to me, with this sword, when the Russian bayonets were clashing in his heart!" "God is great," replied the merchant, calmly; "when that time comes return, and seek my daughter, but not till then." He replaced the amber tube of the narguillah in his mouth, waved his hand to indicate that he wished to hear no more on the subject, and dismissed me, with a heart swollen by grief and mortification. I felt how low the son of Mostapha was fallen when a miserable trader despised his alliance! God of Mohammed, had we come to this? As I rode slowly back to the poor village where with my brothers I dwelt on the hills above Anapa, I revolved a thousand schemes of daring and conquest; for Basilia was now to me a light--a star--a guide; but between us I saw the dark battalions and the strong ramparts of the abhorred Russians, and worse than all, the cunning and the avarice of her selfish father. Could I repel one, or bound the other?