ingers. Her shoulders are covered with costly lace, and the front
of her skirt is like an altar-cloth heavy with embroidery. I dare say,
if one might peep under it, she has gold bangles on her ankles. It would
surprise me if she had an idea in her head beyond the decoration of her
person. As we turn the leaf, there is a full-blooded negress with a
striped napkin twisted gracefully turban-wise round her hair, and coils
of beads, large and small, sinuously dangling on her breast, like the
chains over the Debtor's Door at Newgate. A very fine animal indeed,
this negress, with power in her strong shiny features; a nose of
courage, thin in the nostrils, and cheek-bones high, but not so high as
those of a Red Indian. If she were white, she might pass for a
Caucasian, but for that gibbous under-lip. She lacks the wide mouth and
the hinted intelligent archness of the Two-Headed Nightingale, and has
not the moody expression and semi-sensuous, semi-ferocious development
of the muscular widows of Cetewayo; but for a negress she is handsome
and well-built, and would fetch a very good price in the market. The
slave-trade still flourishes in Morocco. On the next page we meet two
types of young Moorish females: one a peasant, taken surreptitiously as
she stood in a horse-shoe archway; the other a lady of the harem,
taken--no matter by what artifice. The peasant, swathed from tip to heel
in white like a ghost in a penny booth, and shading her face with a
cart-wheel of a palm-leaf hat looped from brim to crown, and with one
extremity of its great margins curled, is a prematurely worn,
weather-stained, common-looking wench, with a small nose and screwed-up
mouth. She is a free woman, but I would not exchange the dusky
bondswoman for five of her class. Centuries of bad food, much
baby-nursing, and field-labour sink their imprint into a race. The harem
lady, whose likeness was filched as she leaned an elbow against a low
table, is in a state of repose. She squats tailor-fashion, her fingers
are twined one in another in her lap, her eyes are closed, and her
expression is one of drowsy, listless voluptuousness. She is fair, and
her dress (for she is not arrayed for the reception of visitors) is
simple--a peignoir, and a sash, and a fold of silk binding her long rich
tresses. A soft die-away face, with no sentiment more strongly defined
than the abandonment to pleasure and its consequent weariness. By no
means an attractive piece of flesh and b