A certain rich man apologised to a Dervish because his servants, without his knowledge, had often driven him away: the holy man showed, he said, great patience and humility in coming back after such ill-treatment. The dervish replied that it was no merit but only one of the “traits of the dog,” which returns however often it is driven off. The worst enemies to the dervish have ever been the Ulemas, for whom he is a kind of dangerous lunatic strongly tinged with heresy. Among his unconventional ideas was sure to penetrate, more or less, the neoplatonist or Sufic view of animals. Wherever transcendental meditations on the union of the created with the Creator begin to prevail, men’s minds take the direction of admitting a more intimate relation of all living things with God. We might be sure that the dervishes would follow this psychological law even if we could not prove it. To prove it, however, we need go no further than the great prayer, one of the noblest of human prayers, which is used by many of the Dervish orders. There we read: “Thy science is everlasting and knows even the numbers of the breaths of Thy creatures: Thou seest and hearest the movements of all Thy creatures; thou hearest even the footsteps of the ant when in the dark night she walks on black stones; even the birds of the air praise Thee in their nests; the wild beasts of the desert adore Thee; the most secret as well as the most exposed thoughts of Thy servants Thou knowest....” In the same way, it was natural that the Dervishes should be supposed to have the power attributed to all holy (or harmless) men over the kings of the desert and forest. It could not be otherwise. Bishop Heber heard of two Indian Yogis who lived in different parts of a jungle infested by tigers in perfect safety; indeed, it was reported that one of these ascetics had a nightly visit from a tiger, who licked his hands and was fondled by him. This is a Hindu jungle story, but it would be just as credible if it were told of a Dervish. Of the credibility of the first part of it, and probably of the last also, there is not a single wandering ascetic of any sort who would entertain a doubt. Some years ago a Moslem recluse deliberately put his arm into the cage of Moti, the tiger in the Lahore Zoological Gardens. The tiger lacerated the arm, and the poor man died in the hospital after some days’ suffering, during which he showed perfect serenity. He had made a mistake; the tiger, brought up as a cub by British officers and deprived of his liberty, was not endowed with the power of discrimination possessed by a king of the wild. This, I hope, the Fakeer reflected, but it is more likely that he deemed that cruel clutch a sign of his own unworthiness and accepted death meekly, hoping not for reward but for pardon.