travellers, with their asses, could hardly follow, and asked me whether this was the same animal as that on which I came. After our arrival at home, in the land of the Beni Saad, the most unfruitful of lands, my cattle returned every evening satisfied and full of milk, so that we had milk enough to drink whilst others suffered great want. Thus we found God's blessing and abundance in everything, till two years had passed, when the boy was weaned, having grown stronger than any other child. We now took him to his mother, though desirous to keep him longer, on account of the blessing he had brought to us. Accordingly I said to his mother: "Will you not leave your child longer with us, till he has grown stronger; for I fear the bad air of Mecca might prove hurtful to him?" We urged the matter until she consented, and sent the child back with us.'

The necessity which thus appeared to have existed, and to which Halima's story only covertly alludes, of securing to the child the benefit of a more invigorating climate beyond the usual term of suckling, confirms the assumption of his constitutional delicacy. An event happening not long after his second return to the country of the Beni Saad is a palpable proof that he was organically and from childhood an hysterical, visionary subject. Ibn Ishak reports that, when their Prophet was one day asked by some of his friends for an account of his early life, he described that event in the following words: 'Once, whilst I was tending the cattle, together with my foster-brother, two men clothed in white and bearing a golden wash-basin, filled with snow, came towards me, seized me, split open my body, took out my heart, cut it open, and removed from it a black clot, which they threw away. Then they washed my heart and body quite clean with the snow, and one of them said to the other, "Weigh him against ten of his people;" and when he did so, I outweighed them. Then he said, "Weigh him against a hundred of his people; "but I again outweighed them. He continued, "Weigh him against a thousand of his people;" and when I outweighed them too, he said, "Leave him now for if thou wert to put his entire people into the scale, he would outweigh them all."'

Halima also refers to the same subject, proceeding with

her story as follows: 'Some months after our return home, when he was with the cattle, in company of his foster-brother, the latter, one day, came running to us, and said, "Two men robed in white, have seized my brother, the Koreishite, stretched him on the ground, cut open his body, and felt about in it."¹ I and his father hastened to the spot, and, finding him quite altered in appearance, we asked him what had happened. He answered thus: "There came towards me two men in white clothes, stretched me on the ground, split open my body, and sought something in it, I know not what." We brought him to our tent, and his father said to me, "I fear this boy is plagued by evil spirits: take him back to his family, before it becomes known." We therefore soon started to take him to his mother. She, on seeing us so unexpectedly, exclaimed, "O nurse, what has happened to bring thee hither, after all thy solicitation to keep the child longer?" I answered, "God has allowed my son to grow up; I have done my part, and am afraid lest any misfortune should happen to him." Amina rejoined, "This is not the reason: tell me the exact truth;" and she urged me, till I told her all that had taken place. Upon this she said to me, "Fearest thou that he is possessed with an evil spirit?" and on my answering "yes," she continued, "Never, by Allah! Satan finds no access to him; for he will one day have to occupy a high position. Shall I tell thee something about him?" On my again answering "yes," she went on, saying, "When I was with child I saw a light shining forth from me, so bright as to illuminate the palaces of Bosra in Syria. My pregnancy was lighter and pleasanter than I had ever seen. As soon as he was born he stretched out his hands on the ground, and raised his head towards heaven. But leave him now with me, and return safely to thy home."'

This account of an event happening in Mohammed's childhood, when, however, he cannot have been merely two or three years old, but must have been about double that age, is of great importance in rightly estimating his character and history. It proves that the hysterical paroxysms from which he suffered in after life, and to which he attributed his