him as the tendency to weep under the stress of sympathetic emotion. Covetousness, he tells an emir, is well enough in merchants but unseemly in kings, a dictum which received scant respect in practice from other monarchs of his time. Of the seventy thousand dinars collected by one of his generals as a single day's ransoms at Jerusalem only thirty dinars remained on the morrow. Saladin had given all the remainder to poor Moslems. After the victory on the plain of Acre he was the possessor of ten thousand horses. All were given to his officers and men, and a large sum of money went from his private purse to pay the expense of returning the Moslem prisoners freed by that victory to their homes. Never did a poet, a scholar or a hafedh go out of his presence without gifts. He even resented being told he had been taken advantage of. When his secretaries tried to protect him from the importunities of the conscienceless he brushed them aside. " I was often ashamed at the greed shown by those who asked," wrote one of them, but it was useless to tell him he had already given, for he would insist on giving again, " with as much pleasure as though he had not given them anything before," and increasing the amount. Although it was a common procedure to chastise dishonest servants, Saladin would not permit the infliction of corporal punishment and once, when two purses filled with Egyptian gold pieces were stolen from him, and copper coins substituted, he could be