When four years old, he appears to have become subject to epileptic fits, then ascribed to the visitation of evil spirits. So he was then sent back to his mother; but about a year afterwards she died, to the great grief of the sensitive child; nor did he ever forget his sorrow, visiting her tomb years afterwards, and weeping and lamenting over it aloud.
Probably the first exciting event in the boy's life was in his twelfth year, when he was allowed by his guardian to accompany the caravan that passed from the south on the way to Syria. He had never been far away from home before for any length of time, and the journey through the desert northwards must have strongly impressed his mind. The imagination of the people had filled these solitudes, as has been the case in all lands, with supernatural inhabitants, monstrous and malignant, the Genii or Djinns of the Arabian Nights. The horror of loneliness, either in the night or the equally silent noontide, found expression in mysterious tales and legends haunting every hill and vale of the regions through which he passed. Again, Mahomet during these journeys must have come across many Christians, but not Christians such as those of the West. They were strange people, these Eastern heretics; some making the Virgin Mary their only God, others joining her in the Trinity with the Father and the Son, others with confused and confusing theories of the relations of the Three Persons of the Godhead and of the scheme of the Incarnation and the Redemption. If at this time Mahomet felt aspirations for a purer and higher religion than the star-worship of his countrymen, it need not surprise us that Christianity such as this, obscured further by the
