will fly out, and lead you a will-o'-the-wisp dance across all the trim sharp hedges of accustomed proprieties, and over the barren flats of social decencies. Dumb is that faery, so long has she been secluded, and can not say much to her fellows. But she feels and sees and enjoys all the more exquisitely and profoundly for her long sequestration.

Presently an old woman came in with a tár, a kind of tambourine, and her husband, a grisly old sinner, with a rabáb, or one-stringed fiddle. Old Hecate was a gone Ghazeeyah—a rose-leaf utterly shriveled away from rosiness. No longer a dancer, she made music for dancing. And the husband, who played for her in her youth, now played with her in her age. Like two old votaries who feel when they can no longer see, they devoted all the force of life remaining, to the great game of pleasure, whose born thralls they were.

There were two tarabukas and brass castanets, and when the old pair were seated upon the carpet near the door, they all smote their rude instruments, and a wild clang raged through the little chamber.

Thereto. they

sang. Strange sounds-such music as the angular, carved figures upon the Temples would make, had they been conversing with us-sounds to the ear like their gracelessness to the eye.

This was Egyptian Polyhymnia preluding Terpsichore.

XX.

Terpsichore.

"The wind is fair,

The boat is in the bay,

And the fair mermaid Pilot calls away

KUSHUK ARNEM quaffed a goblet of hemp arrack. 'The beaker was passed to the upper divan, and the Howadji, sipping, found it to smack of aniseed. It was strong enough for the Pharaohs to have imbibed-even for Herod before beholding Herodias, for these dances are the same. This dancing is more ancient than Aboo Simbel. In the land of the Pharaohs, the Howadji saw the dancing they saw, as uncouth as the temples they built. This dancing is to the ballet of civilized lands, what the gracelessness of Egypt was to the grace of Greece. Had the angular figures of the Temple sculptures preluded with that music, they had certainly followed with this dancing.

Kushuk Arnem rose and loosened her shawl girdle in such wise, that I feared she was about to shed the frivolity of dress, as Venus shed the sea-foam, and stood opposite the divan, holding her brass castanets. Old Hecate beat the tár into a thunderous roar. Old husband drew

sounds from his horrible rabáb, sharper than the sting of remorse, and Xenobi and the Giraffe each thrummed a tarabuka until I thought the plaster would peel from the wall. Kushuk stood motionless, while this din deepened around her, the arrack aerializing her feet, the Howadji hoped, and not her brain. The sharp surges of sound swept around the room, dashing in regular measure against her movelessness, until suddenly the whole surface of her frame quivered in measure with the music. Her hands were raised, clapping the castanets, and she slowly turned upon herself, her right leg the pivot, marvelously convulsing all the muscles of her body. When she had completed the circuit of the spot on which she stood, she advanced slowly, all the muscles jerking in time to the music, and in solid, substantial spasms,

There

It was a curious and wonderful gymnastic. was no graceful dancing-once only there was the movement of dancing when she advanced, throwing one leg before the other as gipsys dance. But the rest was most voluptuous motion-not the lithe wooing of languid passion, but the soul of passion starting through every sense, and quivering in every limb. It was the very intensity of motion, concentrated and constant. The music still swelled savagely in maddened monotony of measure. Hecate and the old husband, fascinated with the Ghazeeyah's fire, threw their hands and arms excitedly about their instruments, and an occasional cry of enthusiasm and satisfaction burst from their lips. Suddenly stooping, still muscularly moving, Kushuk fell upon her knees, and

writhed with body, arms and head upon the floor, still in measure-still clanking the castanets, and arose in the same manner. It was profoundly dramatic. The scenery of the dance was like that of a characteristic song. It was a lyric of love which words can not tell-profound, oriental, intense and terrible. Still she retreated, until the constantly down-slipping shawl seemed only just clinging to her hips, and making the same circuit upon herself, she sat down, and after this violent and extravagant exertion was marbly cold.

Then timid but not tremulous, the young Xenobi arose bare-footed, and danced the same dance-not with the finished skill of Kushuk, but gracefully and well, and with her eyes fixed constantly upon the elder. With the same regular throb of the muscles she advanced and retreated, and the Paradise-pavilioned prophet could not have felt his heavenly hareem complete, had he sat smoking and entranced with the Howadji.

Form so perfect was never yet carved in marble-not the Venus is so, mellowly molded. Her outline has not the voluptuous excess which is not too much-which is not perceptible to mere criticism, and is more a feeling flushing along the form, than a greater fullness of the form itself. The Greek Venus was sea-born, but our Egyptian is sun-born. The brown blood of the sun burned along her veins the soul of the sun streamed shaded from her eyes. She was still, almost statuesquely still. When she danced it was only stillness intensely stirred, and followed that of Kushuk as moonlight succeeds sunshine. As she

went on, Kushuk gradually rose, and joining her they danced together. The Epicureans of Cairo indeed, the very young priests of Venus, assemble the Ghawazee in the most secluded Adyta of their dwellings, and there eschewing the inystery of the Hintyan, and the gauziness of the tob, they behold the unencumbered beauty of these beautiful women. At festivals so fair, arrack, raw brandy, and "depraved human nature," naturally improvise a ballet whereupon the curtain here falls.

Suddenly, as the clarion call awakens the long-slumbering spirit of the war-horse, old Hecate sprang to her feet, and loosening her girdle, seized the castanets, and with the pure pride of power advanced upon the floor, and danced incredibly. Crouching before like a wasted old willow, that merely shakes its drooping leaves to the tempest-she now shook her fibers with the vigor of a nascent elm, and moved up and down the room with a miraculous command of her frame.

In Venice I had heard a gray Gondolier, dwindled into a Ferryman, awakened in a moonlighted midnight, as we swept by with singers chanting Tasso, pour his swansong of magnificent memory into the quick ear of night.

In the Champs Elysées I had heard a rheumy-eyed Invalide cry with the sonorous enthusiasm of Austerlitz, "Vive Napoleon," as a new Napoleon rode by.

It was the Indian summer goldening the white winterthe Zodiacal light far flashing day into the twilight. And here was the same in dead old Egypt-in a Ghazeeyah who had brimmed her beaker with the threescore and ten drops