Already certain of the sanctuaries, the most venerable of them indeed, have been entirely renovated.

After having re-echoed for some years to the sounds of hammers and chisels, during the course of these vast renovations, they are restored now to peace and to prayer, and the birds have recommenced to build their nests in them.
It will be the glory of the present reign that it has preserved, before it was too late, all this magnificent legacy of Moslem art.

When the city of "The Arabian Nights," which was formerly there, shall have entirely disappeared, to give place to a vulgar _entrepot_ of commerce and of pleasure, to which the plutocracy of the whole world comes every winter to disport itself, so much at least will remain to bear testimony to the lofty and magnificent thought that inspired the earlier Arab life.

These mosques will continue to remain into the distant future, even when men shall have ceased to pray in them, and the winged guests shall have departed, for the want of those troughs of water from the Nile, filled for them by the good imams, whose hospitality they repay by making heard in the courts, beneath the arched roofs, beneath the ceilings of cedarwood, the sweet, piping music of birds..