Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE WOELD AND THE FLESH WHEN a man, in the heyday of his manhood, voluntarily lives the life of a monk or hermit, his friends suppose him to be either religious, defective, or possessed of a secret mistress. Now, nobody supposed Daniel Lane to be religious, for he seldom put his foot inside a church: and people seem to be agreed that religion is, as it were, black kid gloves, handed out with the hymnbooks and, like them, " not to be taken away." Nor did anybody think him abnormal, for a figure more sane, more healthy, or more robust in its unqualified manhood, could not easily be conjured before the imagination. Hence the rumour had arisen in Cairo that the daughters of the Bedouin were not strangers to him; but actually, like most rumours, this was entirely incorrect. He did, in very truth, live the life of a celibate in his desert home; and if this manner of existence chanced to be in accord with his ideas of bachelorhood, it was certainly in conformity with the nature of his surroundings. Some men are not attracted by a diet of onions, or by a skin-polish of castor oil. Whtfn he had been commissioned by a well-known scientific institute to make a thorough study of the manners, customs, and folk-lore of the Bedouin tribes of the Egyptian desert, he had entered upon his task in the manner of one dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge; and he found in the life he was called upon to lead the opportunity for the practice of those precepts of the philosophers which, in spite of his impulsive nature, had ever appealed to him in principle during the course of his wide reading. Almost unwittingly he had cultivated the infinite joys of a mind free from care, free from the desires of the flesh; and, with no apparent, or, at any rate, no great effort, he had estab...