The Girl from Hong-Kong: A Story of Adventure Under Five Suns — page 117: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE GIRL FROM HONG-KONG. 111 The dirty beggar as he whimpered by Marked not the roses with his jaundiced eye. The sweating muleteers, dull brainless clods, Loud-mouthed and coarse, their appetites their gods, All hurried by unheeding, bawling loud Their paltry wares unto the tawdry crowd That gathered there, among the dingy shops Where e’en the Muezzin’s call reluctant drops Into the hubbub of the rank bazaar. The ass’ bray, the copper-hammer’s jar. Yet still the Jonely blood-red roses bleomed, And still the air was dreamily perfumed. The throng passed by, but ever, day by day, A cripple crept along the dusty way, An old man, gray with time and bent with toil, Worn out with years; and spent with life’s turmoil, Who sat there silent all the livelong day And breathed the roses blooming by the way. “Yet envy spied his patient solitude, His life’s last idlesse in a corner mewed. And swift away unto the sultan sped To vent its spleen upon that hoary head. For it so chanced the sultan had decreed Naught might exist save that for which was need: ‘And needless he who all the livelong day Doth only smell the roses by the way!’ So cried the mean whose malice laid the charge; Then from that corner’s rose-petalled marge Swart Mamelukes dragged the silver-bearded sago Through squalid lanes that mocked his hoary age. And while the mob of Naishapur jeered, The sultan sternly questioned through his beard: ‘My kingdom holdeth naught without its worth— Old ran; what. good art thou upon this earth;.... comicbooks.com