You acted with discretion and with a fine distinction. You purchased not in bulk or by contract, but neatly, carefully, "at different times." You weighed each opportunity, you gauged each transaction.
Achmet, your perseverance alone should have made you the one, the satisfied of lovers. Into how many eyes you looked! How many whispering voices you gauged! The sincerity of how many protestations did you not search with the white-hot flame of your own profound and tortured spirit! Is it she, or she? Is she here at last ...? Twelve hundred of them--the splendid tale, the royal regiment of many and many, and more still, the dwindling perspective of research. "Who knows?" you said. "At last, as the feet stumble in the final excess of weariness, the fountain may be heard ... at last." You deserved it beyond all men, Boulee, and as we read we expect, breathless, the climax of your surpassing endeavour, we expect to hear at the very end the low tones of the beloved voice that answers, "Que tu perdes ou que tu gagnes, tu les aura toujours." Your reward is upon you. You shall be greeted with the divine reply, "Tecum vivere amem, tecum obeam libens."
Achmet, take your ease. To one man Paradise shall be restored, and one man shall be, once in the story of the race, secure. One man shall make harbour. One man shall rest in his home.
But what is this comes at the close of all? Wind of death! I know that chill--and Achmet knew it, too. Alas! Boulee! "Not one of this disposition did he find."
They were twelve hundred, come from the tenderest and the best; chosen out of all the Orient; patiently comprehended one by one; approached, protected, adored each in holy turn, "in hopes of meeting _one_ not only capable of inspiring love but of feeling all its force and impulse" in her own breast.... Mortality returns: "Not one of this disposition did he find."
Since we are determined (as I am not, but as all my colleagues seem to be) that a new world has arisen; since, therefore, all institutions may be remodelled at will, I trust there will appear in the education of wealthy children a reform overdue these many years.
This reform is an addition, of a certain subject, to the curriculum of schools. We have all at one time or another deplored its absence: we all, in one crisis or another of our lives, recognise its necessity. If it be true that we have to-day an opportunity for new things, do let us inaugurate this novelty at least, which would be of such vast advantage to the generation now sprouting. And the new subject is Fraud.