that the Muslim are a continent race, or that Mehemet Ali was Simeon Stylites, because he exported the dancing-girls.

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 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 fascinating toy. The women suggest houris, perhaps, but never an

gels. Devils, possibly, but never friends. And now, Pacha, as we stroll slowly by starlight under the lamps, 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 voluptuons 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, jealous 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 unveiled 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 defence, 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 Epicurus.

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, among the other patriarchal benefits, upon stout old England?

"Thus in the ever-closed hareem,

As in the open Western home,
Sheds womanhood her starry gleam,
Over our being's busy foam.

Through latitudes of varying faith,
Thus trace we still her mission sure,

To lighten life, to sweeten death;
And all for others to endure."

Every toad carries a diamond in its head, say Hope and the Ideal. But in any known toad was it ever found? retorted the Howadji, cutting adrift his western morals.

6*

XIX.

KUSHUK ARNEM.

THE Howadji entered the bower of the Ghazeeyah. A damsel admitted us at the gate, closely veiled, as if women's faces were to be seen no more forever. Across a clean little court, up stone steps that once were steadier, and we emerged upon a small, inclosed stone terrace, the sky-vaulted antechamber of that bower. Through a little door, that made us stoop to enter, we passed into the peculiar retreat of the Ghazeeyah. It was a small, white, oblong room, with but one window, opposite the door, and that closed. On three sides there were small holes to admit light as in dungeons, but too lofty for the eye to look through, like the oriel windows of sacristies. Under these openings were small glass vases holding oil, on which floated wicks. These were the means of illumination.

A divan of honor filled the end of the room-on the side was another, less honorable, as is usual in all Egyptian houses-on the floor a carpet, partly