Page:Lippincotts Monthly Magazine-13.pdf/215

Clustered together, every several pair
Looking a different light through cloudy folds
Of scarce-concealing yachmags—fronted him.
All classes of the quarter seemed to be
Mixed in that mob of angry womanhood.
Backing the widow as their orator,
And giving spirit to her agile tongue.
Here waved the sober garments of the poor.
Slip-shod and hulking on untidy feet;
There, purple, orange, green and bloody red,
Rustled and flickered the abounding robes
Of richer ladies, and from breast and brow
Glimmered a priceless brilliant now and then,
Sun-smitten, flaming, as the dainty dame
Opened her silken garment, in the act
To draw it tighter round her wrathful form.
Halil was startled, as who might not be
Before the splendor of those leveled eyes?
And said, a little shaken from his poise,
"What want ye, women?" "Justice!" cried the dame;
And then, more mildly: "Lo, the Prophet says,
'He is not good who doth not on himself
Justice,'—the selfsame justice he would mete
Against another." Then the Pacha said,
Slowly, with caution: "What is your complaint?
What need of justice have ye? against whom?"
The flood-gates of the dame's excessive speech
Burst open at the challenge: "Lo, the man
Fronts you from yonder mirror! What my cause?
Harken! You plan a garden for your taste,
High-walled and ample, that the vulgar poor
May never spy my lord's luxurious ways
When with his jeweled hussies—worse than poor—
He takes an airing in his private grounds.—
Ah, we have heard of that! Now answer me,
What right have you to fence God's land away
From God's poor creatures? Nay, nor end you here:
Little by little, day by day, you push
Your wall beyond your boundaries, swallowing up
The narrow plots and scanty breathing-space
Of us poor people, till we live in night,
At very noonday, on the land you leave.
What shame deters you to perform by day,
At night you compass; laying founding-stones
In trenches, dug while those you plunder sleep,
To waken ruined. Mark, my single case!
Within my little garden every year
I raised enough of potherbs, flowers and fruits
To keep, and barely keep, my boy and me
From close starvation. You have cut the sun—
God's sun, not yours, I tell you once again!—
With your high wall from looking at my plants.
And now they wither, nor bear flower nor fruit,—
And God alone can tell our future!" Here