ess," said the princess, "why did
you not make them your companions, enjoy their conversation, and partake
their diversions'? In a place, where they found business or amusement,
why should you alone sit corroded with idle melancholy? or, why could
not you bear, for a few months, that condition to which they were
condemned for life?"

"The diversions of the women," answered Pekuah, "were only childish
play, by which the mind, accustomed to stronger operations, could not be
kept busy. I could do all which they delighted in doing by powers merely
sensitive, while my intellectual faculties were flown to Cairo. They
ran, from room to room, as a bird hops, from wire to wire, in his cage.
They danced for the sake of motion, as lambs frisk in a meadow. One
sometimes pretended to be hurt, that the rest might be alarmed; or hid
herself, that another might seek her. Part of their time passed in
watching the progress of light bodies, that floated on the river, and
part, in marking the various forms into which clouds broke in the sky.

"Their business was only needlework in which I and my maids, sometimes
helped them; but you know that the mind will easily straggle from the
fingers, nor will you suspect that captivity and absence from Nekayah
could receive solace from silken flowers.

"Nor was much satisfaction to be hoped from their conversation: for of
what could they be expected to talk? They had seen nothing; for they had
lived, from early youth, in that narrow spot: of what they had not seen
they could have no knowledge, for they could not read. They had no ideas
but of the few things that were within their view, and had hardly names
for any thing but their clothes and their food. As I bore a superiour
character, I was often called to terminate their quarrels, which I
decided as equitably as I could. If it could have amused me to hear the
complaints of each against the rest, I might have been often detained by
long stories; but the motives of their animosity were so small, that I
could not listen without intercepting the tale."

"How," said Rasselas, "can the Arab, whom you represented as a man of
more than common accomplishments, take any pleasure in his seraglio,
when it is filled only with women like these? Are they exquisitely
beautiful?"

"They do not," said Pekuah, "want that unaffecting and ignoble beauty,
which may subsist without sprightliness or sublimity, without energy of
thought, or dignity of virtue. But to a