Three vessels have arrived here without bringing any news from you. Are you ill, or does it amuse you to make me uneasy?

If you do not love me in a country where you are quite unfettered, how will it be in the middle of Persia, and in the bosom of your family? But perhaps I am wrong: you are charming enough to find friends everywhere; the heart is a native of all lands: what should hinder a generous nature from forming attachments? I confess, I respect old friendships; but I am quite pleased to make new ones everywhere.

In whatever country I have been, I have lived as if I were to spend the rest of my days there: I have had the same strong liking for virtuous people, the same pity, or should I say the same love, for the wretched and the same esteem for those whom prosperity has not blinded. That is my character, Usbek: wherever I find men, I choose friends.

There is here a Guebre1 who I believe, after you, holds the chief place in my heart: he is the very soul of honour. Special reasons have obliged him to retire to this town, where, with his beloved wife, he lives peacefully on the earnings of an honest trade. A generous temper has distinguished him all his life; and although he prefers obscurity, there is more of true heroism in him than in many of the greatest monarchs.

I have often spoken to him of you, and I show him all your letters. I note that this gives him great pleasure, and I perceive already that you have a friend, who is unknown to you.

Here you will find his principal adventures. Although he was very reluctant to write them, he can refuse nothing to my friendship, and I confide them to yours.

THE HISTORY OF APHERIDON AND ASTARTE.

I was born among the Guebres, whose religion is perhaps the oldest in the world. My misfortunes began, when, at the age of six, love dawned in me before reason, and I could not live without my sister. My eyes were always fixed on her, and if she left me for a moment, she found me, on returning, bathed in tears: each new day added not more to my age than to my love. My father, astonished at such strength of feeling, was quite willing that we should be married, according to the ancient custom of the Guebres, introduced by Cambyses2; but fear of the Mohammedans, under whose yoke we lived, prevented our people from thinking of those holy alliances, which our religion orders rather than permits, and which are such innocent reflections of a union already formed by nature.

My father, seeing how dangerous it would be to follow my inclination, which was also his, determined to extinguish a flame, believed by him to be newly lit, but which was already at its height. Under pretext of a voyage, he took me away, leaving my sister in the hands of a relative; for my mother had been dead for two years. I cannot describe the misery of that separation: I embraced my sister, she all bathed in tears, but I, dry-eyed; for grief had made me callous. We arrived at Tiflis; my father, having entrusted my education to one of our relatives, left me, and returned home.

Some time after, I learned that, through the influence of one of his friends, he had placed my sister in the harem of the king to wait upon a sultana. Had I been told of her death, I could not have been more overcome; for, apart from the fact that I could never hope to see her again, her entrance into the harem had made her a Mohammedan, and according to the superstition of that religion she could only regard me with horror. Nevertheless, unable to live longer at Tiflis, tired of myself and of life, I returned to Ispahan. My first words to my father were acrimonious; I reproached him with having placed his daughter in a place which could not be entered without a change in religion. “You have drawn upon your family,” said I to him, “the anger of God and of the Sun which lights you: you have done more wrong than if you had polluted the elements, inasmuch as you have polluted the soul of your daughter, which is not less pure: I shall die of grief and of love; and may my death be the only calamity which God will make you suffer!” With these words I went away; and for two years I spent my life staring at the walls of the harem, and wondering in which part of it my sister might be, in danger every day of having my throat cut by the eunuchs, who walk their rounds about that dread place.