It was a horrible retribution, therefore, for Walderheros to contemplate, and which, no doubt, will have a beneficial effect upon his future conduct as regards the respect due to the institutions of the Church, when, on the morning after the end of the fast, which was to be a day of great rejoicing, I intimated my determination to eat no more flesh meat for at least a week. After all my jests about the folly of fasting, telling my people that during the continuance of such terms of abstinence, I was a good Mahomedan, and having by my example on more than one occasion, tempted him and the others of my household to indulge in food when they ought to have been observing a stricter discipline--after all this, on the day appointed for rejoicing, to see all appetite taken from me was so evidently a judgment from heaven, that I was strongly recommended to propitiate the Virgin Mary immediately by bestowing the goat, which the Negoos had sent to me at Myolones, upon a church dedicated to the Mother of Christ. So disinterested in fact, was Walderheros, that he went off to procure one of the priests upon the establishment, and who, when he arrived, had I carried out my servant’s intentions, would have walked away with the goat immediately, such was his anxiety for my restoration to the favour of heaven. I could not be very well angry with Walderheros, and I was too ill either to laugh at, or to endeavour to convert the priest, so I dismissed him with an ahmulah, for his willingness to relieve me of the supposed ban under which I was laid. When he was gone, however, the weather having cleared up a little, I directed my servants to kill the goat, and to ask such of their Christian friends who lived in Aliu Amba to come to the party on the occasion, as I wanted it eaten up, that no temptation should exist to divert me from my resolution not to take any animal food. The best butcher in the place, Tinta’s misselannee, who had always shown himself ready to render assistance whenever I required some extra hand, could not, of course, be omitted. Gwalior, another servant of Tinta, and a patient of mine, was also called in at the death of the doomed goat, which gallantly showed fight, surrounded, as he was, by a host of hungry enemies, who, besides seeking the satisfaction of revenge for the indiscriminate tuppings and bumpings he had given and occasioned among the party, had had their interest excited by the portions of his venison mutton, that each, in the mind’s eye, already saw hanging up in a mimosa tree that grew in my garden, and which formed the shambles generally on such occasions.