THE GUEBRE PRIEST. 
235 
“ What words shall picture what those looks conveyed — 
The lore of love those lotus eyes revealed ! 
What firmness could resist the honest warmth 
Of Nature’s mute expressiveness, nor fall 
Before those orbs, that now, like opening buds, 
Beneath the creeper of the tremulous brow 
Expansive bloomed, and, now retiring, shrunk 
But half averted from the answering gaze, 
Then dropped the veiling lashes o’er their brightness ! ” 
Like most Eastern women of her tribe, she calmly 
acquiesced in whatever line of conduct her parent 
might think fit to pursue, without presuming to ques- 
tion either the propriety or prudence of his determina- 
tion. She performed the necessary domestic duties of 
his household in silence; and if she did not acquiesce 
in, she never attempted to oppose, what was done by 
him, to whom she had been taught from infancy to 
consider absolute obedience an imperative and religious 
obligation. 
Not long after his union with the three desperadoes 
of his own tribe, there were certain indications of a 
lawless course of life, which did not tend to render 
the tomb either a desirable or a happy home to the 
fair daughter of Jumsajee Merjee. It was soon evi- 
dent to her that her father had become a freebooter, 
which she could not but think, in the silence of her 
sombre dissatisfaction, a vocation ill becoming a priest 
of the Guebres, the ancient worshippers of fire, and 
the only true votaries, as she imagined, of the most 
primitive religion. She frequently witnessed scenes 
which caused her heart to loathe her home ; yet she 
uttered not a word of complaint, though it was evi- 
dent, from the restless motion of her eye and the hur- 
