Stalls are erected with all the various preparations of food peculiarly agreeable to Turkish palates; tempting shops stand invitingly open, and tinkling music vibrates through the air. If Allah only is remembered in the day, night seems to exclude that divinity from every thought; while Eblis is apparently enthroned with all the orgies of his dominions.
Exhausted nature at length compels the laboring classes to seek their couches, while the more fortunate pashas and efendis, beguile the remaining hours till morn, with continued festivities and the exchange of social visits.
Just before daybreak, the drum resounds through the streets of the metropolis, when the faithful, without any reluctance, arise from their slumbers to avail themselves of their last chance of regaling their appetites and fortifying their corporeal frames against the sufferings of the next fourteen consecutive hours.
The morning gun, now booming upon the still air, re-echoed from hill to hill, proclaims the dawn of another day, of self mortification at the "gate of Heaven."
How true the observation that the most helpless of all creatures is man, born of a woman, who cometh forth like the tender bud of a delicate and fading flower.
The ever-living soul embarks on the vast ocean of life, in so frail and delicate a tenement, that there is no semblance of strength to resist the angry waves that continually dash against the tempest-tossed and quivering fabric.
But it outrides the storm of three score years and ten, until it is engulfed in the maelstrom and eddying circles of the river of Death. How vast, how exquisite are the sensibilities of man, whose first emotions of pleasure and pain, are the alphabet of humanity.
The pleasure felt by a sentient being, creates the first ideas of good, while on the other hand the sensation of pain is synonymous with evil. As we awake into existence, each passing moment seems to develop new desires; our grasping souls and bodily wants are constantly re-echoing each other's cravings; unsatisfied human nature is ever on the alert, crying, give, give. This restless search for good, pleasure, or happiness, leads its victims astray, and thus is created the preponderance of evil; for such hot and eager haste stays not to discriminate. The fatal apple seemed so good and so much to be desired to the mother of all living, that she took, and ate; but when she had eaten her eyes were opened. Thus by such efforts to secure the good, the limit is overstepped, and suffering and sorrow entailed. Still, none enjoy, and none suffer in the same degree; innumerable have been the specimens of nature's handiwork, yet never were any two individuals alike in their natural or intellectual structure.