s
in the shaded portico of a mansion:

"She held in her hand a goblet of snow-cold water, into
which she dropt some sugar, and tempered it with spirit of
wine; but I know not whether she scented it with attar, or
sprinkled it with a few blossoms from her own rosy cheek. In
short, I received the beverage from her idol-fair hand: and
having drunk it off, found myself restored to new life."

Ward writes (115) that the following account of Sharuda, the daughter
of Brumha, translated from the Shiva Purana, may serve as a just
description of a perfect Hindoo beauty. This girl was of a yellow
color; had a nose like the flower of a secamum; her legs were taper,
like the plantain-tree; her eyes large, like the principal leaf of the
lotos; her eyebrows extended to her ears; her lips were red, like the
young leaves of the mango-tree; her face was like the full moon; her
voice like the sound of the cuckoo; her throat was like that of a
pigeon; her loins narrow, like those of a lion; her hair hung in curls
down to her feet; her teeth were like the seeds of the pomegranate;
and her gait like that of a drunken elephant or a goose.

There is nothing coarse in this description, yet every detail is
purely sensual, and so it is with the thousands of amorous rhapsodies
of Hindoo, Persian, Turkish, Arabic, and other Eastern poets.
Concerning the Persians, Dr. Polak remarks (I., 206) that the word
_Ischk_ (love) is always associated with the idea of carnality
(_Was'l_). Of the Arabs, Burckardt says that "the passion of love
is indeed much talked of by the inhabitants of the towns; but I doubt
whether anything is meant by them more than the grossest animal
desire." In his letters from the East the keen-eyed Count von Moltke
notes that the Turk "passes over all the preliminary rigmarole of
falling in love, paying court, languishing, revelling in ecstatic joy,
as so much _faux frais_, and goes straight to the point."

WILES OF AN ORIENTAL GIRL

But is the German field-marshal quite just to the Turk? I have before
me a passage which seems to indicate that these Orientals do know a
thing or two about the "rigmarole of love-making." It is cited by
Kremer[121] from the Kitab almowascha, a book treating of social
matters in Baghdad. Its author devotes a special chapter to the
dangers lurking in female singers and musical slaves, in the course of
which he says:

"If one of these girls meets a rich young ma