The house of the meritorious sheik differed in no respect from the dwellings of the other inhabitants. It also was entirely built of timber, consisted of four rooms leading one out of another, and two venerable nut-trees stood in front of it.
Kasi Mollah sits outside, leaning tranquilly against the door-post beneath the projecting eaves, both sides of which are covered by large scarlet-runners, plaiting with great care and solemnity a whip out of twelve fine thongs of kid-skin hanging on a crooked nail.
Squatting on the ground beside him on a bear-skin sits a peculiar-looking stranger. Even if you had not seen it in his features and clothing, his mules standing before the door would have told you that he did not belong to these parts. He was, indeed, a Greek merchant from Smyrna, who visited Circassia every year to purchase kid-skins--or, so he said. He had three palaces in Smyrna; but it is scarcely credible that he could have acquired them by his kid-skins only. At any rate, his mules were laden now with whole bundles of furs and pelts, and the merchant was toasting his host in a sour beverage, made by the Circassian from horse's milk, the evil odor of which he was striving to dispel with the smoke of good Latakia tobacco.
It was for him also that the Circassian was making that long mule-driving whip of thongs of twelve different colors, serpentine in shape, and plaited at the ends with beautiful white horse-hair; and when it was ready he smacked it so vigorously, by way of showing it off, that the merchant could scarce save his eyes from it.
"A pretty whip, and a good whip," he said, at last, in order that its owner might leave off cracking it.
"I'll very soon prove whether it is a good whip or not," said the Circassian, without moving a muscle of his brown, oval-shaped, apathetic face; and with that he began to make the handle of the whip out of fine copper wire of a fantastically ornate pattern nicely studded with leaden stars.
"How will you prove that it is a good whip?" asked the merchant.
"Yes, naturally. I should not think of proving it on other people's children."
"You are surely not going to prove the whip on your own?"
"On whom else, then? Children should be whipped in order that they may be good, that they may be kept in order, and that they may not get nonsense into their heads. 'Tis also a good thing to train them betimes to endure greater sorrow by giving them a foretaste of lesser ones, so that when they grow up to man's estate, and real misfortune overtakes them, they may be able to bear it. My father used always to beat me, and now I bless him for it, for it made a man of me. Children are always full of evil dispositions, and you do well to drive such things out of them with the whip."