Note 22 — NI’AMAH BIN AL-RABI’A AND NAOMI HIS SLAVE-GIRL.

This habit of weeping when friends meet after long parting is customary, I have noted, amongst the American “Indians,” the Badawin of the New World; they shed tears thinking of the friends they have lost. Like most primitive people they are ever ready to weep as was Æneas or Shakespeare’s saline personage:—

This would make a man, a man of salt

To use his eyes for garden waterpots.

(King Lear, iv. 6.)