THE HASHEESH EATER
For a place, New York for instance, a stranger accounts, not
by saying that any one of the many who testify to its existence
copied from another, but by acknowledging “there is such a
place.” So do I account for the fact by saying “there is such
a fact.”
We try to imitate Eastern narrative, but in vain. Our
minds can find no clew to its strange untrodden by-ways of
speculation; our highest soarings are still in an atmosphere
which feels heavy with the reek and damp of ordinary life.
We fail to account for those storm-wrapped peaks of sub-
limity which hover over the path of Oriental story, or those
beauties which, like rivers of Paradise, make music beside it.
We are all of us taught to say, “ The children of the East
live under a sunnier sky than their Western brethren: they
are the vefositors of centuries of tradition ; their semi-civilised
imagination is unbound by the fetters of logic and the schools.”
But the Ionians once answered all these conditions, yet Homer
sang no Eblis, no superhuman journey on the wings of genii
through infinitudes of rosy ether. At one period of their
history, France, Germany, and England abounded in all the
characteristics of the untutored Old World mind, yet when
did an echo of Oriental music ring from the lute of minstrel,
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