ty, who
was unable to stand except on all fours. Result: around the arms, 1
foot 11 inches; chest, 4 feet 4 inches; thigh, 2 feet 7 inches; calf,
1 foot 8 inches; height, 5 feet 8 inches.

"Meanwhile, the daughter, a lass of sixteen, sat stark-naked
before us, sucking at a milk-pot, on which her father kept
her at work by holding a rod in his hand; for as fattening
is the first duty of fashionable female life, it must be
duly enforced by the rod if necessary. I got up a bit of
flirtation with missy, and induced her to rise and shake
hands with me. Her features were lovely, but her body was
round as a ball."

Speke also tells (370) of a girl who, a mere child when the king died,
was such a favorite of his, that he left her twenty cows, in order
that she might fatten upon milk after her native fashion.

ORIENTAL IDEALS

Mungo Park declared that the Moorish women

"seem to be brought up for no other purpose than that of
ministering to the sensual pleasures of their imperious
masters. Voluptuousness is therefore considered as their
chief accomplishment.... The Moors have singular ideas of
feminine perfection. The gracefulness of figure and motion,
and a countenance enlivened by expression, are by no means
essential points in their standard: With them _corpulence
and beauty seem to be terms nearly synonymous_: A woman of
even moderate pretensions must be one who cannot walk
without a slave under each arm, to support her; and a
perfect beauty is a load for a camel.... Many of the young
girls are compelled, by their mothers, to devour a great
quantity of kouskous, and drink a large bowl of camel's milk
every morning.... I have seen a poor girl sit crying, with
the bowl at her lips, for more than an hour; and her mother,
with a stick in her hand watching her all the while, and
using the stick without mercy, whenever she observed that
her daughter was not swallowing."

A Somali love-song says: "You are beautiful and your limbs are fat;
but if you would drink camel's milk you would be still more
beautiful." Nubian girls are especially fattened for their marriage by
rubbing grease over them and stuffing them with polenta and goat milk.
When the process is completed they are poetically likened to a
hippopotamus. In Egypt and India, where the climate naturally tends to
make women thin, the fat