elegantly proportioned, with a
well-set neck, sloping shoulders, and fine bust; and her carriage had
that stately and sylph-like grace which no words can depict, and which
is found nowhere on earth but among the Orientals. Her hands and feet
were exquisitely small and symmetrical. Her arms, which were bare
to the shoulder, displayed everything of fullness, rotundity and
lines of beauty that could be desired. Their hue and delicacy
of texture would have reminded a connoisseur of brownish satin.
Her waist, tight-cinctured, was--which is the highest praise--not
ultra-fashionable, and the undulations of her gauzy drapery disclosed,
as she receded, enough of ankle and crural adjacency to furnish hints
of improvement to most classical sculptors. Her lips, I regret to say,
were too liny, and not of the true ruby tint, but with the exception
of her mouth all her features were, not to say more, good. As to her
eyes, I should do injustice by any attempt to describe them. An object
must be susceptible of calm and dispassionate contemplation if one
would analyze it afterward without complete disaster. A very
irresistible little piece of orientality she must indeed have been,
perchance the reader will conclude. And yet, if the reader is a man
and a brother--that is to say, a brother white man--I answer him he is
altogether in too great a hurry. He has forgotten her color; and color
is a matter which we narrow--minded dwellers in the North find it
impossible to be liberal about. Not by five-and-twenty shades, at the
least, did the trim creature resemble any lily of the valley but a
very dark one; and of the rose she was totally unsuggestive. If I had
been so cosmopolitan as to make love to her, she could not have
called up a blush to save her pretty little soul and body. She might
have turned green or yellow, for aught I know, but by no possibility
could she have done what she ought to have done.

At Fyzabad there is but little to see, and that little is rather
uninteresting. What impressed me there, more than anything else, was a
particular private dwelling, and especially a certain room in it. The
edifice to which I refer belonged to an opulent Mohammedan, and had
been erected by an English architect. Being constructed pretty closely
on the model of a mansion in Belgravia, it was wholly unsuited in a
hot climate to any purpose except that of torture. In all probability,
its constructor, as he roasted over his work, omitted of set i