or so, who came here to-day
for medicine. I think I never saw such sweet frank, engaging manners, or
ever heard any one express himself better: quite _une nature distinguee_,
not the least handsome, but the most charming countenance and way of
speaking.

My good friend the Maohn spent the evening with me, and told me all the
story of his marriage, though quite 'unfit to meet the virtuous eyes of
British propriety--' as I read the other day in some paper apropos of I
forget what--it will give you an idea of the feelings of a Muslim
_honnete homme_, which Seleem is through and through. He knew his wife
before he married her, she being twenty-five or twenty-six, and he a boy;
she fell in love with him, and at seventeen he married her, and they have
had ten children, all alive but two, and a splendid race they are. He
told me how she courted him with glasses of sherbet and trays of
sweatmeats, and how her mother proposed the marriage, and how she
hesitated on account of the difference of age, but, of course, at last
consented: all with the naivest vanity in his own youthful attractions,
and great extolling of her personal charms, and of her many virtues.
When he was sent up here she would not, or could not, leave her children.
On the Sitt's arrival his slave girl was arrogant, and refused to kiss
her hand, and spoke saucily of her age, whereupon Seleem gave her in
marriage to a black man and pays for her support, as long as she likes to
suckle the child he (Seleem) had by her, which child will in due time
return to his house. _Kurz_, the fundamental idea in it all, in the mind
of an upright man, is, that if a man 'takes up' with a woman at all, he
must make himself responsible for her before the world; and above all for
the fate of any child he may have by her (you see the Prophet of the
Arabs did not contemplate ladies _qui savent nager_ so well in the
troubled waters of life as we are now blessed with. I don't mean to say
that many men are as scrupulous as my excellent friend Seleem, either
here or even in our own moral society). All this was told with
expressions quite incompatible with our manners, though not at all
_leste_--and he expatiated on his wife's personal charms in a very quaint
way; the good lady is now hard upon sixty and looks it fully; but he
evidently is as fond of her as ever. As a curious trait of primitive
manners, he told me of her piety and boundless hospitality; how when some
friends came lat