The knight's strength of mind gave way to a burst of agonized distress, and he groaned and wept aloud.
While he thus indulged his grief, a clear and solemn voice, close beside him, pronounced these words in the sonorous tone of the readers of the mosque, and in the lingua franca mutually understood by Christians and Saracens:-- "Adversity is like the period of the former and of the latter rain--cold, comfortless, unfriendly to man and to animal; yet from that season have their birth the flower and the fruit, the date, the rose, and the pomegranate." Sir Kenneth of the Leopard turned towards the speaker, and beheld the Arabian physician, who, approaching unheard, had seated himself a little behind him cross-legged, and uttered with gravity, yet not without a tone of sympathy, the moral sentences of consolation with which the Koran and its commentators supplied him; for, in the East, wisdom is held to consist less in a display of the sage's own inventive talents, than in his ready memory and happy application of and reference to "that which is written." Ashamed at being surprised in a womanlike expression of sorrow, Sir Kenneth dashed his tears indignantly aside, and again busied himself with his dying favourite.
"The poet hath said," continued the Arab, without noticing the knight's averted looks and sullen deportment, "the ox for the field, and the camel for the desert.

Were not the hand of the leech fitter than that of the soldier to cure wounds, though less able to inflict them ?" "This patient, Hakim, is beyond thy help," said Sir Kenneth; "and, besides, he is, by thy law, an unclean animal." "Where Allah hath deigned to bestow life, and a sense of pain and pleasure," said the physician, "it were sinful pride should the sage, whom He has enlightened, refuse to prolong existence or assuage agony.
To the sage, the cure of a miserable groom, of a poor dog and of a conquering monarch, are events of little distinction.

Let me examine this wounded animal." Sir Kenneth acceded in silence, and the physician inspected and handled Roswal's wound with as much care and attention as if he had been a human being.

He then took forth a case of instruments, and, by the judicious and skilful application of pincers, withdrew from the wounded shoulder the fragment of the weapon, and stopped with styptics and bandages the effusion of blood which followed; the creature all the while suffering him patiently to perform these kind offices, as if he had been aware of his kind intentions.
"The animal may be cured," said El Hakim, addressing himself to Sir Kenneth, "if you will permit me to carry him to my tent, and treat him with the care which the nobleness of his nature deserves.

For know, that thy servant Adonbec is no less skilful in the race and pedigree and distinctions of good dogs and of noble steeds than in the diseases which afflict the human race." "Take him with you," said the knight.