But the next day Zobeide gave up pouting and began very docilely to eat the greens, and when the boy Hakem carried her next bunch to her he said slyly: 

“Effendi, she is growing smaller!”

The clergyman attempted to shrug his shoulders, but it was impossible to disguise the fact from himself—­Zobeide had certainly shrunk!  And within an hour all Damascus knew that Zobeide had shrunk.  When Mr. Feathercock went to the barber shop the Greek barber said to him, “Sir, your turtle is no ordinary turtle!” When he went to call on Mrs. Hollingshead, a lady who was always intensely interested in all subjects that she failed to understand and who discussed them with a beautiful freedom, she said to him:  “Dear sir, your turtle.  How exciting it must be to watch it shrink!  I am certainly coming to see it myself.”  When he went to the Anglican Orphanage, all the little Syrians, all the little Arabs, all the little Armenians, all the little Jews, drew turtles in their copy-books, turtles of every size and every description, the big ones walking behind the little ones, the tail of each in the mouth of another, making an interminable line.  And in the street the donkey drivers, the water-carriers, the fishmongers, the venders of broiled meats, of baked breads, of beans, of cream, all cried:  “Mister Turtle, Mister Turtle!  Try our wares.  Buy something for your poor stubborn beast that is pining away!”

And, in truth, the turtle continued to shrink.  She became again the size of a soup plate, then of a dessert plate, then of a saucer, till finally one morning there was nothing there but a little round thing, tiny, frail, translucent, a spot about as big as a lady’s watch, almost invisible at the base of the fountain.  And the next day—­ah! the next day there was nothing there, nothing whatever, neither turtle nor the shadow of turtle, or more trace of a turtle than of an elephant in all the grounds!

Mohammed-si-Koualdia had stopped taking hashish, because he was saturated with it.  But he remained all day long, huddled in a heap at the door of the little cafe immediately opposite the clergyman’s house, his eyes enlarged out of all proportion, set in a face the color of death, gave him the look of a veritable sorcerer.  At this moment the Rev. Mr. Feathercock was returning from a visit to the English consul who had said to him coldly: 

“All that I can tell you is that you have made an ass of yourself or, as a Frenchman would say, played the donkey to hear yourself bray.  The best thing you can do is to go and hunt up a congregation somewhere else.”

The Rev. John Feathercock accepted the advice with deference, and took the train for Bayreuth.  That same evening Mohammed-si-Koualdia betook himself to the house of one Antonio, interpreter and public scribe, and ordered him to translate into French the following letter, which he dictated in Arabic.  Afterwards he carried this letter to Father Stephen, prior to the monastery of the Greek Hicrosolymites: