One is apt to judge of a woman before one sees her by
the air of elegance or coarseness with which she surrounds her
home; I judged Osman's wives by this test, and condemned them both.
But the strangest feature in Osman's character was his
inextinguishable nationality. In vain they had brought him over
the seas in early boyhood; in vain had he suffered captivity,
conversion, circumcision; in vain they had passed him through fire
in their Arabian campaigns, they could not cut away or burn out
poor Osman's inborn love of all that was Scotch; in vain men called
him Effendi; in vain he swept along in eastern robes; in vain the
rival wives adorned his harem: the joy of his heart still plainly
lay in this, that he had three shelves of books, and that the books
were thoroughbred Scotch--the Edinburgh this, the Edinburgh that,
and above all, I recollect, he prided himself upon the "Edinburgh
Cabinet Library."
The fear of the plague is its forerunner. It is likely enough that
at the time of my seeing poor Osman the deadly taint was beginning
to creep through his veins, but it was not till after I had left
Cairo that he was visibly stricken. He died.
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