several sorts of sherbet. One of these, I recollect well, was a delicious iced lemonade, flavoured with cinnamon and spice. I am the more particular about this, because I pride myself upon having introduced this exquisite and innocent beverage into my own country, and regard that, and the knowledge of an Arabian specific for most diseases incident to horse flesh, as the chief benefits which posterity will derive from my eastern travels.

When our appetites, sharpened by a twentyfour hours fast had been appeased, then followed the luxuries of the Calleoon. Oh! if our lovers of the wine table could but have witnessed the long drawing of the rose-perfumed smoke, the half-closed eyes, and features smoothed into placid content after the fretful impatience of a long hungry day, and all the good-humoured temperate delight of my Mazunderaun friends, they would break their champaigne glasses and betake themselves to the long, slender, luxurious, graceful, poetical Persian water-pipe.

Next came coffee, after which the conversation was gradually resumed. The company was literary, and tales, apologues, original verses, and happy quotations from Sadi, Hafiz, Nizami, and Ferdosi flew about. was in a delightful mood.

The Meerza himself He was the life of the

whole company.

Never was there a more ap

propriate quotation than that which his cousin Aga Sulliman Malek applied to him from Sadi.

"Rehim, choon oo bee foui der terken bash," &c.

"Although upon his whitened head
The snows of age are thickly spread,
Yet in the hours of festive joy,
He sports a careless, laughing boy.
Such the reward of blameless life,

Unworn by wine, or fraud, or strife."

Yes, replied the old man, though I have borne my share of the burdens of life, I can still drink with as much pleasure as ever at the two fountains which the Almighty has caused to spring up in the desert for our refreshment on the journey of human life-the fountain of Friendship and that of Poetry, as our Sadi has described them:

"Life is a desert, wild and drear,

Midst whose bleak rocks and herbless plains,
And sullen vales unblest by rains,

The traveller faints with thirst and fear;
Yet two bright rivers wind and bear

Greenness and joy and bloom along;
The stream of Social Thought is there,
And there, the pleasant stream of Song:
The way-worn traveller by their brink
Stoops midst thick springing flowers to drink :
Or 'neath the Chenar's shade, spell-bound,
Leans listening to the current's sound.

"But," said he, turning to me, I had almost forgotten my promise." He then related the history of Shedaud; and such was the melody of his voice, the felicity of his gesture, and the expressive play of his countenance, that in spite of my imperfect knowledge of the language, I followed the narrative and listened throughout with great delight. The broad sun glared in upon us before he had quite ended, and broke up our sober festivities with the termination of his tale.

Having found out that my friend prided himself a little upon the "eloquence of the reed's cloven tongue," that is to say, in our mode of speech, upon taste in composition and skill in penmanship, I prevailed on him before we parted, to give me a written copy of this tale or tradition, and am thus enabled now to offer my readers a translation of it.

In the course of my oriental studies I have since repeatedly met with the substance of the story of Shedaud. It is alluded to in the Koran, and is minutely told in the Tarikh-Tebry; but I can perceive that my friend has, in his version of the tradition, combined it with other eastern histories, as well as given to it the colouring of his bold and picturesque imagination, and the hue of his own genuine morality. In fact, when he

presented the manuscript to me, he said, that he trusted I would accept it as a memorial of friendship, and not to gratify an author's vanity; "for," added he, "there is but little in it which I can claim as my own invention. My part of the composition is but the coarse thread on which are strung some choice diamonds dug from the deep mines of tradition, and a few lovely pearls fresh from the vast ocean of my country's poetry.— Changing the language of love to that of friendship, I might say with Hafiz

"See'st thou that string of gems and pearls
Which braids my Leila's glossy curls?
E'en such the poetry whose blaze
Thick flashes through my humble lays.
Diamonds are there of ray divine,
Dug from the old Arabian mine;
And Persia's pearls, of purest white,
There beam with mild reflected light.
Whilst I am but the worthless thread

That wreaths them round my Leila's head."

Whether this tale, in its present dress, will please others as much as it did me in the original, I cannot say; but it certainly has one merit,— that of being (bating the faults of my own translation and style, and the necessity of accommodating eastern thoughts and expressions to our more timid western taste,) in incident, sentiment,

and ornament, a genuine oriental historical tale, and therefore running no danger of deserving the criticism which Collins used to pass on his own Persian Eclogues, that "they were Irish pastorals."