sash, a third his jewel-hilted dagger, and the fourth the purse which he vainly attempted to conceal; the rest, meanwhile, rode around him and pricked him with the points of their long spears. He was then handed over to the soldiers, and buffeted about till his bones ached. When the shekh returned for his slave he found him in a sorry plight, for he was covered with blood and bruises, and his garments were torn to tatters. Could his counterfeit and second self, the vanished beggar, have seen him then, even he must have pitied him, he was so ragged and forlorn.

It pleased the shekh to ride through Cairo before he started for the desert, and the whim seized him to make Abdallah lead his camel. The slave walked before his master, sullen and slow, the string of the camel slack in his hand, and his eyes fixed on the ground. Turn which way he would he was blasted by the sight of human faces. Men of all ranks and conditions rejoiced at his abasement. Children climbed up arches and gateways to get a glimpse of him; citizens pointed him out to strangers, and veiled women peered at him from latticed balconies. Many of his debtors were present, and merry enough they were too. It was not every day that they could pay their debts so easily!

After traversing the principal streets of the city, passing squares, markets, and bazaars, the shekh halted to make room for a processsion. First came a file of soldiers loaded with swords and daggers, and armfulis of sashes and shawls; then a row of black slaves, each with a jar of gold or jewels on his head; and lastly, the head eunuch leading a veiled girl, who trembled under her veil! The heart of the slave sank within him. It was the spoil of his own bazaars which the Sultan had just seized, and his own child Zuleika on her way to the accursed Harem! A mist swan before the eyes of the wretched man; he staggered a step, and fell senseless in the dust.

When he came to himself he was traveling with a caravan, for the tribe whose slave he had become, were journeying back to the desert. The shekh rode at their head, and Abdallah led his camel over the sand.

An ocean of yellow sand stretched away on all sides till it reached the edge of the horizon. Not a tree or plant was to be seen anywhere, not even a blade of grass. The sky was without a cloud, intensely blue and bright, and the sun a perfect glare of light.

Sometimes they followed the track of former caravans, trampling in the footprints of men and camels; at others, they struck out a path for themselves, making the far-away mountains landmarks.

The road was frequently strewn with bones, the skeletons of men and camels, some of whom were overthrown by whirling clouds of sand, while others must have perished from starvation.

One skeleton in particular impressed Abdallah, and made him thoughtful for a long time. It lay in advance of the multitude, and beside it was a broken water-cruse. He picked up a fragment of the cruse, and saw its owner's name engraved under the mark of the potter. The dead man was one of his own agents, a trusty Egyptian who started on a long journey for him, and never returned. "He met his fate in the desert," thought Abdallah, "he was starved to death that I might increase my gains. I remember now that his wife told me this, but I feigned to think it false, and refused her a single piastre. I am punished now, for I am in the desert myself. Allah forbid that his fate should be mine!"

He cast his eyes over the sea of rolling sand, and sighed aloud. Up to this time, and it was now the second day of the journey, he had made no complaint; but now his limbs began to fail him from excessive weariness. The hot sand burnt his tender feet, the waste of flint, into which the caravan had come, cut him to the very bone, and his steps were marked with blood.

In the afternoon the caravan halted at a valley well, and pitched their tents for the night. The valley was a mere gully, the bed of some ancient river, and the well a pit of brackish water. A stunted palın rustled in the burning air, and a few brave tufts of grass disputed the supremacy of the sand. It was a dreary place, but it seemed a garden to the weary Abdallah.

The camels were fed and tethered for the night: the shekh and his sons sat cross-legged in the tent and related marvellous tales; the slaves huddled together, and sang wild songs in strange tongues; but Abdallah, stood alone in the shade of the palm. His first impulse was flight, but a glance at his swollen feet convinced him of its utter folly. Had he needed anything else to deter him he could have found it in the hyena tracks which surrounded the valley.

He threw himself under the stunted palın, and strove to forget the change in his fortunes. He was no longer Abdal

lah the slave, nor yet Abdallah the merchant, but Abdallah the man, a man alone with nature.

The stars were out by thousands, sparkling in the deep blue sky, and the moon lifted her horn above the rim of the desert. The first news that Abdallah had of her presence was a long ray of light which she shot full in his eyes. He turned his head aside and it glinted on the surface of the well. A second followed it, and discovered what the dusk had for some time concealed, the dusky faces of the slaves as they sang their strange wild songs. Then Abdallah saw the white tent of the shekh, and the group of tethered camels, and then the stretch of desert beyond.

There was something in the moonlight which made everything it shone upon beautiful, even the stern old shekh who came to the door of his tent to watch the slaves. It softened the heart of Abdallah and filled him with tender and dreamy thoughts. He remembered how often he had seen it shining on the mosques and domes of Cairo, and how it flooded the walks of his garden, and dripped from the walls of his beloved kiosk. Then his fancy wandered, as a moonlight fancy sometimes will, to ruinous old houses, and he saw the Beggar's Quarter as it was on the previous morning. The houses were old still, with walls and chimneys leaning to a fall; yet their decay seemed in some degree repaired, for the chinks and doors were closed, he knew not how, while the windows were curtained with white.

"If the moonlight does so much for the beggar's houses," thought Abdallah, "what might not human kindness do for the beggars?" It was a manly thought, and it ennobled even while it grieved him. He pondered over his past life, its narrow selfishness and blindness, and giving himself up to the influences around was initiated into the mysteries of nature. And the first thing that the universal mother taught him was that nothing exists for itself alone. He saw, in thought, the moon and stars shining on the earth, and the earth baring her brow to receive their light, giving her own in return. The land gradually crumbled into the sea on one side of the world, while the sea as gradually withdrew its waters from the land on the other. The clouds covered the mountains with snow: the snow melted and formed rivers: the rivers with mist fed the clouds; and the clouds turned into snow. and again covered the mountains.

The dew crept into the heart of the flowers, and the flowers breathed their fragrance to the falling dew. Innumerable were the examples of Nature, that it is necessary to give, as well as to receive. Yes, and even to give when there is no hope of receiving in return. "The desert, for instance," thought Abdallah, what can the sun hope to gain by shining on its rocks and billows of sand? For leagues there is no living thing, save now and then a scorpion, or a straggling blade of grass. Yet the sun shines as generously there as in the gardens of Cashmere, and the stars, and the queenly moon brighten the solitude with their luminous smiles! And the great God of the heavens, the infinite and everlasting Allah, who made and overlooks the worlds--of what avail to Him are the prayers, and the lives of even the holiest? Yet the hands of the great Father are always stretched forth with blessings and bounties, and his ears are always open to the cries of his children."

"I have not performed my part," said Abdallah sadly, "as God and Nature perform theirs, but from this hour I will amend my life. I have not fallen in vain since I have learned to fulfil my duty. God is great!"

He rose from his seat beneath the palm, and walked to the edge of the valley, where he saw a stunted colycinth growing alone in the sand. Curiosity impelled him to view it closer, and he hastened to it, although it grew in the midst of the hyena tracks. Stooping on his hands and knees he brushed the sand from it, and found that it was dying for want of moisture. Its leaves were shrivelled with heat, and the poor melon which it strove to shelter, was fairly wilted on the stem. It was a worthless plant at best; so bitter that no animal could eat it; but its forlorn condition touched the heart of Abdallah, and retracing his steps to the well he proceeded to water it, using for that purpose a fragment of the broken cruse which he picked up in the desert. That done he bowed his head to the Holy City, and said the prayers of the Faithful, and, creeping among the camels, he was soon fast asleep.

The caravan rose at dawn, and resumed their march. The first good deed of Abdallah repaid him well; for the colycinth was green and fresh. It waved its leaves to him at parting, and the shine of its yellow melon was brighter than gold.

The sky above, and the sand below; a desert of blue, and a desert of yellow. In the upper desert marched the sun, showering abroad his spears of fire, in the under desert the shekh and his tribe, vainly endeavoring to ward them off.

Sun, and sand, and hot wind. Fragments of bleaching bones. A winding string of men and camels, and a solitary swooping kite!

About noon they were startled by a mirage. It was the first that Abdallah Lad ever seen, and he marvelled greatly thereat. It grew up from the sand suddenly, and assumed the shape of a band of roving Bedouins, a tribe of desert robbers, mounted on flying stallions, and armed with long spears which they brandished furiously.

Then it became the house of Abdallah, a perfect picture of his lost mansion in Cairo. Like that, its walls were striped with red; its balconies shaded the street; the fountain played in its kiosk; and a mock Zuleika walked in the shade of its unreal trees!

Its third change was into the Beggars' Quarter, which seemed more wretched, if that were possible, than when Abdallah saw it last. Some of the houses had fairly tumbled down, nearly all the windows and doors were gone, and the squalid wretches had multiplied in every room. Parents had strangled their children, and were weeping for them; children had grown up, and were beating their parents; and the girl with sequins in her hair-she lay stone dead in the street!

Then the mirage surrounded Abdallah, and became the very square in which he was stopped by the beggar. He stared down the long streets, and saw the white

wall of the city, and the fringe of pains overlooking it. Gardens and grain-fields barred the north; on the south and west ran the Nile, alive with glancing sails. The Mokattam hills were flooded with light, and the mosques and minarets blazed with rosy flames. It was too like Cairo, not to be Cairo itself! Abdallah rubbed his eyes, like a man awaking from a dream, and found to his great joy that he had not stirred from the square. The beggar still stood before him, holding out his hand for alms, and in the distance he saw the Captain of the Sultan's Guard! Hardly a moment had elapsed, and yet Abdallah had passed through so many changes of fortune. It was like the prophet's living in the seventh heaven seventy thousand years, while a drop of water was falling from his pitcher to the ground.

"I have not dreamed in vain," said the thankful and humbled merchant, "for I have learned to perform my duty. Here, my brother, is alins for thee," and he gave the beggar a piece of gold; "depart in peace, and be happy. For me-I will go and pray. God is Great!"

"God is Great!"-the muezzins took up the cry, and passed it from minaret to minaret, till the morning wind was Vocal with the sound. The faithful heard it in their houses, and came pouring into the streets, and sought the nearest mosque. Every man drew the slippers from his feet, and, crossing the sacred threshold, worshipped God and the Prophet. There were many solemn prayers said that day, and many grateful men in Cairo, but none that were more devout than Abdallah, the merchant.

"For, by the grace of God," he said, "I am still Abdallah the Merchant, and not Abdallah the Slave."

“W

66

"WHO gave you this name?" My sponsors in baptism." Then these sponsors have much to answer for in this matter of naming, to say nothing of the obligations that they take upon themselves.

The name of a person is a sound that suggests the idea of him. It is indissolubly united with every notion of him; the name and the man are more closely bound than man and wife, for even after

death we associate them together. How important, then, is it that no one should suffer for his name, that no unpleasant, ridiculous, or infamous associations should be connected with it, but rather that it should be honorable and honored.

It is true that the fair Juliet, in a passage often quoted and oftener misquoted, asks

"What's in a name? that which we call a rose, "By any other name would smell as sweet."

Very true; but we do not go to names for smells, any more than to colors for music. And in the instance that she gives, what a loss it would have been to the world, if the word rose "had not existed as the title of the queen of flowers; but, instead of it, some such common unmusical word as turnip or squash had been selected by the founders of the English tongue! What could poets have done with such a word? Where would they have found rhymes for it? The queen of flowers should have a name of beauty, and she has it. We are not able, at present, to say how many of the modern languages of Europe call this flower by a name resembling rose, or identical with it! but we believe that all of them do, which are based in any degree upon the Latin tongue, which had its rosa, a derivative and improvement upon the rodon of the Greeks. Juliet is in a very small minority upon this question.

And we would strengthen our position as to the importance of first names, by quoting Sterne's remark, that no one has ever thought of calling a child after Judas Iscariot. Some come pretty near it when they select the name Judah, which is radically the same name as Judas, but how carefully do they stop here! What an immense difference does a single letter, an H for an S, make!

We say given names, not Christian names, as is more common; for it is not every one having a first name that has a Christian name, as was exemplified in the case of Mr. Levi, who appeared as a witness before the Lord Mayor of London.

"What is your Christian name, Mr. Levi?" said that civic functionary.

"I have not got any, my Lord," was the reply. "I am a Jew, but my first name is Moses."

Various are the tastes in the selection of a name for a child-various are the motives that influence the decision. Sometimes a rich friend or relation is to be conciliated, and therefore some barbarous designation is affixed to a child that is a thorn in his side as long as he lives; and after all, the unfortunate may miss the expected legacy. Sometimes the name of some distinguished man is selected, to which the life of the new wearer adds no new lustre; thus we see George Washington and John Wesley Occasionally figuring in the police reports, as the names of people arrested for

riot or petty larceny. A classical taste inspires others, who are not always very particular in the names, provided they smack of the ancients, owing to which, it happens that there is a boy now living in Philadelphia who has been christened -if we may thus use the word-after Commodus, one of the most infamous of the Roman Emperors.

The late Bishop Chase, of Illinois, had a dislike to having Greek and Roman names imposed upon children, which he displayed very pointedly on one occasion when a child was brought to him to be baptized.

"Name this child," said the bishop. "Marcus Tullius Cicero," answered the father.

"What?"

"Marcus Tullius Cicero.

"Tut! tut! with your heathen nonsense! Peter, I baptize thee," and the child was Peter thenceforth and for

ever.

Others, again, set much store by Scripture names, many of which to our ears are anything but melodious-for instance, Obadiah, Jeremiah, and all the other iahs; but this fashion is not near so prevalent as it was a century or two ago. Some of the Bible names have much sweetness, such as Beulah, Ruhamah, and Rhoda, but even these are rarely used.

The story is well known of the man, who, having called four sons after Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, wished to have the fifth christened Acts, because, as he said, he "wanted to compliment the apostles a bit;" but the sequel, as given by Mr. Lower, in the last edition of his valuable work on "English surnames," is not so familiar to us. It appears that the father had two other sons, who were christened Richard and Thomas, and that the story of the name that had been proposed for No. 5, getting wind amongst his schoolmates, he was constantly annoyed with having this distich repeated, of better metre than rhyme

"Matthew, Mark, Luke and John,
Acts of 'Postles, Dick and Tom."

Some persons appear to have tried how near they could come to the height of absurdity, in giving names to their children. Benjamin Stokeley, the first white settler in Mercer county, Pennsyl vania (whose account thereof is in the fourth volume of the Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania), gave most extraordinary names to all his

children; at present, but one of them occurs to our memory-Aurora Borealis -by which he thought proper to designate one of his daughters. A Mr. Stickney, a distant relative of Dr. Franklin, numbered his children, calling them One Stickney, Two Stickney, &c. We might mention here, the case of Mr. New, who is said to have called his first child, Something, and the next, Nothing; but the story is probably the creation of the fertile imagination of Mr. Joseph Miller, or some of his successors.

We will venture to add a few rules, which are the results of our reflections upon this subject.

1. The son should not be called after his father, nor the daughter after her mother.

The object of giving first names is to distinguish a person from all others bearing the same last name, particularly from those of his immediate family; but this latter is not attained when a child bears the name of its parent. Confusion must always follow, not always to be avoided by the additions of senior and junior, or the designations, 1st, 2d, &c., which are common in New England.

An eminent lawyer, who adorned the Philadelphia bar, forty or fifty years ago, had a son with the same first name as Limself, who was studying law in his office. One day a letter arrived without any addition of junior, but intended for the younger, which the elder gentleman opened and read. It was from a source pot very creditable to any one.

"I am ashamed of you," said the father indignantly, handing it to his

I am ashamed of you, sir," replied the son, handing it back, with his finger pointed at the direction."

One of the sons of the Benjamin Stokely of whom we have spoken above, was born during his father's absence from home. On his return, his wife told tim that she had called the child Benjamin, after him. "None of that," cried ne, I have no notion of hearing people talking of old Ben Stokely."

This confusion is one objection to the practice which we condemn; another is that if a parent calls a child after himself, he is in danger of becoming partial to that child, at the expense of the others. This is a feeling which makes its way into the minds of even good men and good women; it seems to some that a child bearing their name in full, is more fully their representative than

others. As this is all wrong, it is best to prevent the arising of such feelings, by giving no occasion for their existence.

"Who

2. The more common a last name is, the more uncommon should the first name be. We can pardon almost any prefix to Smith, Brown, and Jones. As one of the learned fathers of the bar lately observed in a discourse, shall declare the generation of the Smiths, and especially of the John Smiths?" The very mention of John Smith in a court-house, police office, or other public place-and it is of frequent mention therein-brings a broad grin into every one's face immediately.

3. No name should be given to a child that will suggest a ludicrous idea when written in full, or when the initial only is used. We always pitied Mr. P. Cox, and Mr. T. Potts, both worthy men, but with thoughtless godfathers.

Middle-aged persons, in Philadelphia, can recollect a druggist, named Ash, (now deceased) whose friends had selected Caleb for his first name. He was constantly annoyed with inquiries from school-boys, and others of the rising generation, as to the residence of Mr. Calabash.

Forty or fifty years ago a very worthy little French tailor, named Frogg, resided in Charleston, S. C., and on the birth of one of his sons some wags persuaded him that it would be a very good thing for the child to call him after the chief magistrate of the State-Governor Bull, which was done accordingly, the unlucky combination of the two names never striking the father until it was too late.

4. Females should have but one given name and when they marry, should retain their maiden name as a middle name. This is the practice among the Society of Friends, and were it generally adopted it would have many advantages. We should know at once, on seeing a lady's name whether she was married or single, and, if the former, what the name of her family was. And it is further to be considered that the adoption of this rule of but a single first name for girls, would put an end for ever to the whole brood of Emma Milvindas and Euphemia Helen Lauras, and a style of nomenclature which is thought by most persons to be ridiculous in the extreme.

Have many of our readers seen the pretty verses on the raising of a child, written by Mary, the unhappy sister of Charles Lamb? We shall presume that