He thought of everything under the sun, but most often, perhaps, he thought of what his friend the artist had said to him. The artist himself had stayed only a few months and then gone elsewhere, but what he had told the boy of the greatness of the Arabs remained. Other things which his father, Sadoc, said fitted in with the picture, too. And he made fine dreams about what he would do, when he grew up, to help his people.

In the meanwhile he managed to get on in school without too many thumpings from the master’s ruler, and Sadoc was proud of him, though of course he never admitted as much to the boy. When the father met one of his friends, the conversation was apt to go like this: