, and the
queen of the Anderun.

"The old rascal!" swore Galahad, in his wrath, which was not, however, I
think, caused by any particular Christian disgust at polygamy. "A fat
old sinner, I'll be bound, who sits on his divan puffing his chibouque
and stuffing his sweetmeats, as yellow as Beppo, and as round as a ball.
Bah! what pearls before swine! It's enough to make a saint swear. Those
heavenly eyes!..." And Galahad went into a somewhat earthly reverie,
colored with a thirsty jealousy of the purchaser and the possessor of
this Circassian gazelle, as he rode reluctantly back towards Pera.

The Circassian was in his head, and did not get out again. He let
himself be bewitched by that lovely face which had flashed on him for a
second, and began to feel himself as aggrieved by that innocent and
unoffending Turkish lord of hers, as if the unlucky gentleman had stolen
his own property! The antelope eyes had looked softly and hauntingly
sad, moreover: I demonstrated to him that it was nothing more than the
way that the eyelashes drooped, but nobody in love (very few people out
of it) have any taste for logic; he was simply disgusted with my
realism, and saw an instant vision for himself of this loveliest of
slaves, captive in a bazaar and sold into the splendid bondage of the
harem as into an inevitable fate, mournful in her royalty as a
nightingale in a cage stifled with roses, and as little able to escape
as the bird. A vision which intoxicated and enraptured Sir Galahad, who,
in the teeth of every abomination of Pera, had been content to see only
what he wished to see, and had maintained that the execrable East, to
make it the East of Hafiz and all the poets, only wanted--available
Haidees!

"Hang it! I think it's nothing _but_ Hades," said an Aide, overhearing
that statement one night, as we stumbled out of a half-cafe,
half-gambling-booth pandemonium into the crooked, narrow, pitch-dark
street, where dogs were snarling over offal, jackals screaming, Turkish
bands shrieking, cannon booming out the hour of prayer, women yelling
alarms of fire, a Zouave was spitting a Greek by way of practice, and an
Irishman had just potted a Dalmatian, in as brawling, rowing,
pestiferous, unodorous an earthly Gehenna as men ever succeeded in
making.

Sir Galahad was the least vain of mortals; nevertheless, being as
well-beloved by the "maidens and young widows," for his fair handsome
face, as Harold the Gold-haired, he would have b