costume, and all the womanliness of a woman, growing their thair, vailing their faces, kohling their eyelashes, hennaing their finger and toe nails.

And there was also another set of boy-dancers, called Gink, into the melancholy mystery of which name the discreet and virtuous refrain from prying. The Howadji, too, is Herodotean for the nonce, and "thinks it better it should not be mentioned."

XVIII.

Fair Frailty-Continued.

And so frailty was all boated up the Nile to Esne. Not quite, and even if it had been, Abbas Pacha, grandson of Mohammad Alee, and at the request of the old Pacha's daughter, has boated it all back again. Abbas Pacha heritor of the shreds and patches of the Pharaohs' throne, and the Ptolemies and the Cleopatras. He did well to honor the Ghawazee by his permission of return, for what was the swart queen but a glorious Ghazeeyah? Ask Marc Antony and Julius Cesar. Nor shall Rhodopis be forgotten, centuries older than Cleopatra, supposed to be the builder of one of the pyramids, and of wide Grecian fame.

Herodotus tells her story. She was a Thracian and fellow-servant of Esop. Xanthus the Samian brought her to Egypt, and Charaxus, brother of Sappho, ransomed her, for which service when Charaxus returned, Sappho griev ously gibed him in an ode. Rhodopis became very rich and very famous, and sent gifts to Delphi. "And now," says our testy and garrulous old guide, as if to wash his

hands of her iniquity, "I have done speaking of Rhodopis."

Even grandfather Mohammad did not boat all the frailty up the Nile. That would have been, if the beautiful Ghazeeyah had been the sole Egyptian sinner. But this especial sin pays a tenth of the whole tax of Egypt, and the Ghawazee are but the most graceful groups of Magdalens, not at all the crowd. The courtesans who went with vailed faces discreetly, who were neither handsome nor of any endowment of grace or charm to draw the general eye;-widows and wives, who, in the absence of their lords, mellowed their morals for errant cavaliers ;—the dead-weighted, sensual, ungraceful, inexcusable, and disgusting mass remained, and flourished more luxuriantly.

The solidest sin always does remain ;-the Houris as more aerial are blown away, the sadder sinners cling. Law and propriety yearly pour away into perdition a flowing surface of addled virtue, vice-stained, and a small portion of veritable vice. But the great, old, solid sin, sticks steadfastly, like the lump of ambergris in the Sultan's cup, flavoring the whole draught. For not even the friend of the warm slippers and rolling stone theory, can suppose that the Muslim are a continent race, or that Mohammad Alee was Simeon Stylites, because he exported the dancinggirls.

Hear what Abu Taib said in the gardens of Shubra. Once there was a Pacha, who, after drinking much wine all his days, lost his taste, and fell in danger of his life if he drank of it any more. And the Pacha ordered all the

F

wine in the country to be cast into the river. And the fair fountains that flowed sweet wine of exquisite exhilaration before the mosques, and upon the public place, were seized and utterly dried up. But the loathsome, stagnant tanks,

and ditches of beastly drunkenness that festered concealed behind white walls, were untouched, and flowed poison. And the Pacha heard what had been done, and said, it was well. And far lands heard of the same thing, and said, "Lo! a great prince, who removes sores from his inheritance, and casts out vice from his dominions."

There are English poets who celebrate the pleasant position of the Eastern woman, and it is rather the Western fashion of the moment to fancy them not so very miserably situated. But the idea of woman disappears entirely from your mind in the East except as an exquisite and NYMPHS fascinating toy. The women suggest houris, perhaps, but never angels. Devils, possibly, but never friends. And now, Pacha, as we stroll slowly by starlight under the palms, by the mud cabins round which the Fellaheèn, or peasants, sit, and their fierce dogs bark, and see the twin tombs of the shekhs gleaming white through the twilight, while we ramble toward the bower of Kushuk Arnem and the still-eyed Xenobi, tell me truly by the sworded Orion above us, if you cherish large faith in the virtue of men, who, of a voluptuous climate, born and nursed, shut up dozens of the most enticing women in the strict and sacred seclusion of the hareem, and keep them there without knowledge, without ambition-petted girls with the proud passions of Southern women, seeing him only of men, jeal

ous of each other, jealous of themselves, the slaves of his whims, tender or terrible, looking to him for their sole excitement, and that solely sensual-rarely tasting the bliss of becoming a mother, and taught to stimulate in indescribable ways the palling and flagging passions of their keeper.

Individually, I lay no great stress on the objections of such gentry to the unvailed dancing of beautiful women, or to their pleasurable pursuit of pleasure; nor do I find much morality in it. I am glad to grant the Oriental great virtue; and do not wish to whine at his social and national differences from the West. At Alexandria, let the West fade from your horizon, and you will sail fascinated forever. This Howadji holds that the Ghawazee are the true philosophers and moralists of the East, and that the hareem and polygamy in general, are without defense, viewed morally. Viewed picturesquely under palms, with delicious eyes melting at lattices, they are highly to be favored and encouraged by all poets and disciples of Epi

curus.

Which, as you know as well as I, we will not here discuss. But, as I am out of breath, toiling up that steep sentence of the hareem, while we more leisurely climb the last dust heap toward that bower, the sole white wall of the village (how Satan loves these dear deceits, as excellent Dr. Bunyan Cheever would phrase it) soothe me soothly with those limpid lines of Mr. Milnes, who holds strongly to the high human and refining influence of the hareem. Does Young England wish to engraft polygamy