the beautiful
warm bloom, the proud lips, and the chestnut tresses braided with pearls
and threaded with gold, of your genuine Circassian beauty. Shade of Don
Juan! what a face it was!

A yataghan might have been at his throat, a bowstring at his neck,
eunuchs might have slaughtered, and pachas have impaled him, Galahad
would have seen more of that loveliness: headlong he plunged down the
slope, crushing through the almond thickets and scattering the green
tree-frogs right and left; the caique was just rounding past as he
reached the water's edge, and the beauty's veil was drawn in terror of
her guard. But as the little cockle-shell, pretty and ticklish as a
nautilus, was moored to a broad flight of marble stairs, the Circassian
turned her head towards the place where the Unbeliever stood in the
sunlight--her eyes were left her, and with them women speak in a
universal tongue. Then the green lattice gate shut, the white
impenetrable walls hid her from sight, and Sir Galahad stood looking
down the Sweet Waters in a sort of beatific vision, in love for the
1360th time in his life. And certainly he had never been in love with
better reason; for is there anything on earth so divine as your
antelope-eyed and gold-haired Circassian?

"I shall be inside those walls or know the reason why," said he, whom
two gazelle eyes had fired and captured, there by the side of the sunny
Sweet Waters, where the lazy air was full of syringa and rose odors, and
there was no sound but the indolent beating of the tired oars on the
ripples.

"Which reason you will rapidly find," I suggested, "in a knock on the
head from the Faithful!"

"Well! a very picturesque way of coming to grief; to go off the scene in
the sick-wards, from raki and fruit, would be commonplace and
humiliating, but to die in a serail, stabbed through and through by
green-eyed jealousy, would be piquant and refreshing to the last degree;
do you really think there's a chance of it?" said Galahad, rather
anxiously--the eager wistful anxiety of a man who, athirst for the
forest, hears of the rumored slot of an outlying deer--while he shouted
the Greek fishermen to him, and learned after sore travail through a
slough of mixed Italian, Turkish, and Albanian, that the white palace,
with its green lattice and its hanging gardens, belonged to a rich
merchant of Constantinople, and that this veiled angel was the favorite
of his harem, Leilah Derran, a recent purchase in Circassia