It was a wicked book, the Parson said, a book which no Christian man should read because it made you discontented with your environment and rendered you callous to the natural consequences of your follies in this world and the next. So it lay up on the loft, a much soiled, dingy little volume of widely spaced lines and grey, age-bleached covers, amidst a havoc of incompatible literature, with the little Treubner text of the METAMORPHOSES and the stained, yellow leaves of the Lucretius, of which the Parson only remembered one line:

Quæ quoniam rerum Naturam sola gubernas.

No one knew how it had got there, but tradition asserted in the Pastor's household that a godless hawker (who sold Manchester calicoes of startling hue to the Kaffir maids and bought in exchange ostrich-feathers from their employers at a time when people were rushing to the river diggings in the north) had left it there, together with sundry other volumes of which the same tradition could tell you the titles. There was a small Shakespeare which, having found favour even in that fold of strict Calvinism, had been rebound in blue cloth, and now kissed the boards of Dutch theological tomes on the study shelves. There was an equally diminutive Keats, with a part of the ENDYMION torn out and many interlineations between the verses. There was even a French volume, which, being unintelligible to the majority, tradition had invested with more heathenish vices than it had attached to FitzGerald.

Tradition could tell you the fate of that hawker. He died at the diggings, years later, from a consumption of which he had believed himself radically cured. Riotous living, the result of such constant perusal of the Oriental philosopher who denied that he was a philosopher, had doubtless accelerated his end; but nothing definite was known on that point, nor as to the antecedents of the young hawker. And it was only by turning over the files of the old COMMERCIAL ADVERTISER (now long since descended into that oblivion which overtakes all journals which do not happen to possess a lengthy advertisement list) that one could prove that Henry Everard Hendley, of Rathangan in the County of Kildare, had arrived in the colony, years before anyone had heard of FitzGerald or dreamed of the diamonds in the country. That was the name in the little book, and underneath it, in an unmistakeably feminine hand, and with the s formed like an ƒ in the old style, were the words A present on his birthday from his devoted E. N.

First acquaintances with Omar are usually made in an armchair, with the philosopher on one's lap and a glass of whiskey toddy on the table, an environment, no doubt, which would have earned the whole-hearted approval of Khayyam himself.

a cheerful fire burning, and the sleet driving against the window outside, the introduction becomes immeasurably pleasanter, and although the edition may not be the first, even though it may not be that of FitzGerald, one becomes enamoured of the

new-comer before he has yet wandered farther than the cock crowing and the fleeing of the stars; that is, provided one is of a disposition to merit the Parson's strictures and sympathise with the hawker and the unknown E. N.

But this was a different meeting place. Outside, under a sky that was cloudlessly blue and in an atmosphere that was freshened by a breeze just sufficient to stir the tops of the oleander bushes, outside in the scent of the maturing pontac leaves and the undercurrent of softer odours the breeze wafted from the riverside, the little volume "curled round your heart like a clematis tendril" as Aunt Keet (who read devotional books with a fervour which had won her canonisation rights) was wont to say when referring to her favourite Bogatzsky. The smooth screen of the orange trees and the long vineyard stretching below, miles as it seemed of serried, neatly pruned hanepoot sticks that bore luscious fruit in midFebruary, had nothing very Oriental about them, it is true. The palm tree lower down the garden gave an Eastern touch to the scene; but then it never bore dates and afforded but little shade against the hot summer sun, so that even when steeped in Omar you could not quite fancy that it was the oasis spot where you could sit and read FitzGerald and drink the sweet white wine (misnamed hock) which uncle Ben Hugo manufactured, and sold for fifteen shillings the half aum on market-days. And yet the atmosphere was Omaresque, the environment such as he would have liked, the sad-hearted, merry-voiced old tentmaker of Ispahan. Roses blew in the kitchen-garden, roses of which connoisseur could have told the kind for they had long since been bastardised. A trellis work ran over them (eight feet high and more in places),

no

round the poles of which showy purple Lachrymæ Christi hung in large, bloom-decked clusters. A wealth of grenadellas twined over the wall, their dark blue and white flowers showing clearly against the snowy whiteness of the house to which they had attached themselves. Omar would have sat there, and made more quatrains, and drunk more wine, and talked his cheery philosophy to the native brats who ran about half naked playing with the ostrich chicks.

Poor Henry Everard Hendley knew it differently. In his day it was sedgegrown, most of it, though the vineyard was there and the datepalm, and lower down, where the water-furrow became a quagmire, a grove of plantains that used to bear fruit with big stones in them. He was a queer fellow, people still tell you, sauntering about the place in the twilight and writing bulky letters which he took to the post-bag but never put in though he addressed them carefully and franked them with three penny stamps. Some of the lines in the Omar he had underscored, he or somebody else, and most of them were suggestive.

Oh, take the Cash-in-Hand and waive the Rest

was one, and below on the same page

-in some corner of the Hubbub coucht

Make Game of that which makes as much of Thee.

And there were many others. If he had seen another translation one could easily guess what he would have put his pencil under.

This world an unsubstantial pageant deem;

All wise men know things are not what they seem.

Be of good cheer, and drink, and so

shake off

This vain illusion of a baseless dream.

one verse

That might have been possibly. Khayyam would have read his history easily and prescribed for him accordingly. Here, in this little Quaker-minded village, they understood him as little as they would have understood Omar himself.

The pontac is the king of vines, —in the foliage, not in the fruit. Its grapes are small, sweet, currant-like. Its leaves turn from yellow to red as the the summer decays, and first swallows fly northwards, and people begin to dig round the orangetrees, growing brighter red and brighter every day. On the hill-side they make a splendid show of colour, which no one has ever tried to paint because you cannot put sunlight in a picture, and without sunlight they would seem mere blotches of colour, as if ochre had been strewn over the hill side. Between the plants grows yellow sorrel, luxuriantly rich, which the children dig out and eat in summer time, or play at oxen with. Towards the outskirts of the vineyard, where the garden gave up its civilization to the untrammelled wildness of the veld, without so much as a bamboo fence to guard it, startling crimson Watsonias blossomed in spring, redder than the roses which had been watered by a Caesar's blood. Yet they might have had human fertilisers. A Bushman's kraal once stood there, and tribal fights took place on the hillslopes. Little Bennie, of the house of Hugo, found a skull there once, which his father said was a dog-faced baboon's, but which the village doctor bought for a bag of lollipops to send to the Cape Town Museum, where now it is labelled Cranium of KhoiKhoi, exhibiting characteristic parietal depression. Presented by Dr. E. W. Komfyt, from Paarl vineyard,—rather

ungrammatical and not strictly true, perhaps, but somewhat of a vindication for my large infidel.

South Africans would not appreciate Omar, if you were to translate him into low Dutch and put footnotes to explain the historical allusions. Doubtless no one who cares for him could appreciate him in such circumstances. Willem Kloos writes exquisite sonnets, and Dr. Van Eeden is a poet to his finger-tips, but it is no disparagement to them to say that they could not give us a translation Holland must of Omar if they tried. needs take the Tentmaker's philosophy in English or American, German or French, and it is the same with Africanders. But apart from the difficulties of language there are others; and the main one is this, that Omar and Calvin are incompatibles, although the latter, with predestination and foreordination writ large in his philosophy, might have put in a claim for kinship, and notwithstanding the fact that I have heard the Persian quoted in the City Temple.

But there were others in that vine

yarded village who were Omarists to their hearts' core. The Malay wagonpainter was one, though, indeed, he had never heard of the poet. The natives in the pondoks were, blithely idling their lives away as if they fully agreed with Horace :

Sapias, vina liques, et spatio brevi Spem longam receses.

The old shepherd by the riverside, who had Bushman blood in him and was proud of it, he too swore by Omar, though if you had questioned him he would probably have replied, "Who's he, oubaas?" For they all followed his philosophy, they all lived their day, and when eventide came and they entered the Caravan for the dawn of Nothing they did so quietly,

resignedly, with no unnecessary bedside ceremony. Amadeus, the jet

black Hottentot who cut for the stone such people as were unfortunate enough to be be afflicted with that malady and simple enough to believe in his ancient methods, had his special proverbs which all his neighbours used, and the trend of every one was Omarwards. "Dry

sticks are made to burn "-" What did our good little Lord give you tears for but to weep?"-"People will die so long as the hills shine blue "-"You can't put a sweet potatoe together again when once you've cut it "-and "Don't cry, we know all about it." It was the philosophy they had found practical all their lives long; it was one that suited them. Life in a location is not always what those who talk constantly of the habitual laziness and sloth of the average Cape native make it out to be, for there is enough sadness to temper lightheartedness. It may be evanescent, not from itself but because those upon whom it presses feel much the same as the Tentmaker did. Who, reading Omar with love and understanding, believes that he preached the gospel of mocking at Death and Fate without an aching heart?

In the grape season they came and tendered their services, man, woman and location child. They ate hanepoot (of the quality which is nowadays exported hitherward carefully packed in corkdust) to their hearts' content and drank must (a liquid which is supposed not to inebriate) till the vineyard whirled round and round them and the shining granite boulders on the hill-top appeared to be ogres with wide opened jaws. In the cellars the men-folk rolled up their trousers and trod the grapes under foot, sing

ing the hymns of Moody and Sankey as accompaniment to the rhythmic beat of their naked feet. Later on came the raisin making, when yards and yards of straw matting were put out under the trees and the big bunches of grapes, previously dipped in lye, were spread to dry under the sun. It was an ideal environment in which to read FitzGerald.

Bacon loved the smell of reddening strawberry leaves, and Charles Lamb that of half faded laurels. They both suggest something morbid, something of decay and death, which always present phases of beauty if one looks at them in a proper, Omarlike spirit. For me, give me the smell of the sere leaves dropped from the Lombardy poplars long before winter has come, long before the pontacs have changed to red and flaring crimson. It seems to mingle with the other odours, that smell, with the aroma of the veld around and the perfume of the drying grapes on the raisin floors. It carries with it the twitter of the red-breasted chaffinches in the mealie fields, and the deep, gardenia-like scent of white orchids near the river-side.

Omar in a Cape vineyard is Omar beatified, rendered more understandable, more at one with the world around, even though miles of custom and mires of prejudice separate the vineyard men from thoroughly understanding him. The little paper

covered book was a bibliophile's prize, and the dealer from Port Elizabeth who bought up rare editions would have given much for it. To Henry Everard Hendley it had presentedwho knows what? To the Omarist in the vineyard it meant more than all the village library put together and bound in red morocco leather. And this was strange, the Parson said, seeing it was a godless book.

C. L. L.