Page:Lippincotts Monthly Magazine-20.djvu/759

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1877.]
SELIM.
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do fear, for neither strength nor courage can avail against his wisdom."

Buh Lion, on hearing this, shook himself, and said that he was no more afraid of man than he was of any other creature which he was if the habit of eating; and added that the only beings on earth he was afraid of were partridges.

"Partridges!" exclaims Buh Elephant in wonder. "What do you mean?"

"Why this," says Buh Lion, "that when I am walking softly through the woods I sometimes rouse a covey of partridges, and then they rise all around me with such a whir as to make me start, I am afraid of nothing but partridges."

Not long afterward Buh Elephant heard a gun fired near a neighboring village, followed by a loud, prolonged roar. Going there to learn what was the matter, he saw Buh Lion lying dead by the roadside with a great hole in his body made by a musket-ball. "Ah, my poor friend," said he, "partridges could never have treated you in this way."

William Owens.

SELIM.

SURRENDER your soul to the spell of enchantment,
  And wander with me
Where, river of magical fancies, Euphrates
    Flows down to the sea.

What city sleeps fair and mysterious by moonlight
    Upon the dark shore?
Oh, those are the minarets gleaming of Basrah
    That heavenward soar.

And bright are her flower-lit gardens, whose fountains
    Unceasingly rise,
Where oft, when the locust grew shrill and the summer
    Shone red in the skies,

The caliph would hasten from camp and from council
    To rest and to dream,
To forge, in the workshop of silence, such weapons
    As deadliest gleam,

And with him came Selim, the friend of his spirit—
    Friend favored and true—
Whose palace of marble Euphrates encircled
    With girdle of blue.

There oft by the murmuring waters the caliph
    Would calmly recline,
And mark how the stars on that earth-sullied bosom
    Seemed trembling to shine,

Until, as one evening the moon rose serenely,
    Fair pearl of the sky,
And filled with her presence the palace and desert,
    The far and the nigh,

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