rld" I took at first sight to be a
policeman going his night rounds, and come out in his shirt by mistake;
by the way, it is a droll idea to symbolize the "light of the world" by
a watchman with a dark lantern, _lux in tenebras_ with a vengeance!).
"Give me the sweet shady side of Pall Mall, and the devil may take the
Sweet Waters. What's the Feast of Bairam beside the Derby-day, or your
confounded coloring beside a well-done cutlet? What's lemonade by
Brighton Tipper, and a veiled bundle by a pretty blonde, and an eternity
of Stamboul by an hour of Piccadilly?"

Sir Galahad smiled superior, and shied a date at me.

"Goth! can't you be content to feed like the Patriarchs and live an
idyl?"

"No! I'd rather feed like a Parisian and live an idler! Eat grapes if
you choose; I agree with Brillat-Savarin, and don't like my wine in
pills."

"My good fellow, you're all prose."

"And you're all poetry. You're as bad as that pretty little commissariat
girl who lisped me to death last night at the Embassy with platitudes of
bosh about the 'poetry of marriage.'"

"The deuce!" said Sir Galahad, with a whistle, "that must be like most
other poetry nowadays--uncommon dull prose, sliced up in uneven lengths!
Didn't you tell her so?"

"Couldn't; I should have pulled the string for a shower-bath of
sentiment! When a woman's bolted on romance you only make the pace worse
if you gall her with the curb of common sense. When romance is in,
reason's out,--excuse the personality!"

He didn't hear me; he was up like a retriever who scents a wild duck or
a water-rat among the sedges, for sweeping near us with soft gliding
motion, as pretty as a toy and as graceful as a swan, came a caique,
with the wife of a Pacha of at least a hundred tails in it, to judge by
the costliness of her exquisite attire. Now, women were not rare, but
then they were always veiled, which is like giving a man a nugget he
mustn't take out of the quartz, a case of champagne he mustn't undo, a
cover-side he is never to beat, a trout stream in which he must never
fling a fly; and Sir Galahad, whose loves were not, I admit, quite so
saintly as Arthur's code exacted, lost his head in a second as the
caique drifted past us, and, raising herself on her cushions, the Leilah
Duda, or Salya within it, glanced toward the myrtle screen that half hid
us, with the divinest antelope eyes in the world, and letting the
silver gauze folds of her veil float half aside, showed us