Let the moralizing mind reflect here, that the pursuit of pleasure is an hereditary tenet, dear to the husband as to the wife, who can not be false, because there is no such thing as faithfulness. And let the Moral Reform Society carefully avoid judging this frailty on principle; for in tribes, traditions of usage become principle, by the vice of enlightened lands, where it is a very sorrowful and shameful thing, bred in deceit and ending in despair. In Europe, society squeezes women into this vortex. Then it is a mere pis-aller for existence, and loathsome much more to the victims themselves than to others. In America, a fair preludes the foul. Seduction smoothes the slopes of the pit, although once in, society here, as there, seals inexorably the doom of the fallen. For the Ghazeeyah who turns from her ways, there is the equality with other wives, and no taunting for the past. For the woman who once falls in England or America, there is no resurrection to sympathy and regard. The world, being without sin, casts endless pavingstones, until hope, heart, and life are quite crushed out.

Moralizing at Esne!

Although the Ghawazee, when they marry out of the tribe, do not dishonor their husbands in public estimation, they are by no means held honorable

while they practice their profession. This is for many reasons. But let no moral reformer flatter himself upon the moral sense of the East. "No," said the Golden-sleeve, "I wouldn't trust my own mother." The Ghawazee are not honorable, because being, as Mr. Lane says, the most beautiful of Egyptian women, they show to the sun, moon, stars, and all human eyes, their unveiled faces. Then they receive men into their own apartments-let us not desecrate the sacred name of hareem. And they dance unveiled in public, and if you may believe the shuddering scandal of the saints at Cairo, each of whom has a score of women to dance for him alone, they adorn with nude grace the midnight revels of the Cairene rakes.

Mehemet Ali's mercury of virtue rose in his impotent age to such a height of heat, that he banished all the Cairene Ghawazee to Esne, which sounded morally, until the curious discovered that Esne was the favorite river retreat of the Pacha; and the moment they disappeared from Cairo, they were replaced by boys dressed like women, who danced as the Ghawazee danced, and imitated their costume, and all the womanliness of a woman, growing their hair, veiling 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 Mehemet Ali, 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 Mark 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. and fellow-servant of Esop. brought her to Egypt, and

She was a Thracian, Xanthus the Samian Charaxus, brother of

Sappho, ransomed her, for which service, when Charaxus returned, Sappho grievously 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 Mehemet 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 veiled 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, vicestained, 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