d thorough current of air. Here we sat drinking
sherbet, and, of course, smoking the unfailing chibouque. The lady
mother was painfully anxious to talk to us, and pretty Miss Dudu was
seriously bent on listening; but we could not manage to execute a
colloquy. All the civil things imaginable were expressed to us by
gesture, and the young lady came out strong in the presentation of
bouquets. One fortunate man received from her an orange, the only one
remaining at that time in the garden; this we persuaded ourselves must,
in their symbolical language, imply a declaration of some soft interest.
Miss Dudu would not have been such a very bad _parti_, being, as she
was, the sole heritress of her father's thousands. However, she was, we
understood, engaged already to a youth, who was obeying the cruel law
prevalent in this place, which compels the accepted swain to absent
himself from his inamorata for a long probation. I think the time was
said to be a year; during which no communication must pass between the
parties. Should the first overtures of a suitor be rejected, it is a
settled matter of etiquette, that he never again is to see or speak to
the young lady. This must be likely, we would think, to render a man
cautious in proposing: but certainly it must tend to lessen the number
of eventual old maids, by rendering the young ladies also chary of
saying No, when they mean Yes. On the whole, we can scarcely admire
their matrimonial tactics. We found that we were among a family of
Hadjis. Miss Dudu was a Hadji, and so were her father and mother. In
their case the place of pilgrimage is Jerusalem, a visit to which
confers on them the respectable title of Hadji for life. This old
gentleman had made a pious use of some of his money, by promoting the
cause of pilgrimage among his less opulent brethren. The desire to tread
the holy soil is common to them all; not only to the religious. These
have their motives; but so also have the disorderly and wicked, who
think that a world of cheating and ill-living is covered over by the
wholesome cloak of pilgrimage. There are also certain less considerable
places of pilgrimage, invested with considerable sanctity, though
inferior in character to the one great rendezvous of the religious.
Health to body seems often the expected result of visits to these
secondary places, to which recourse will frequently be had when medical
aid has failed to be available. Dudu's father had made himself highly