mantic tenderness to my adoration of
him, and made me feel that he and I stood against the world. To have his
hand in mine was my delight. Then it was that I could think earnestly of
Prince Ahmed and the kind and beautiful Peribanou, whom I would not have
minded his marrying. My favourite dream was to see him shooting an arrow
in a match for a prize, and losing the prize because of not finding his
arrow, and wondering where the arrow had flown to, and wandering after it
till he passed out of green fields to grassy rocks, and to a stony
desert, where at last he found his arrow at an enormous distance from the
shooting line, and there was the desert all about him, and the sweetest
fairy ever imagined going to show herself to him in the ground under his
feet. In his absence I really hungered for him, and was jealous.

During this Arabian life, we sat on a carpet that flew to the Continent,
where I fell sick, and was cured by smelling at an apple; and my father
directed our movements through the aid of a telescope, which told us the
titles of the hotels ready to receive us. As for the cities and
cathedrals, the hot meadows under mountains, the rivers and the
castles-they were little more to me than an animated book of geography,
opening and shutting at random; and travelling from place to place must
have seemed to me so much like the life I had led, that I was generally
as quick to cry as to laugh, and was never at peace between any two
emotions. By-and-by I lay in a gondola with a young lady. My father made
friends fast on our travels: her parents were among the number, and she
fell in love with me and enjoyed having the name of Peribanou, which I
bestowed on her for her delicious talk of the blue and red-striped posts
that would spout up fountains of pearls if they were plucked from their
beds, and the palaces that had flown out of the farthest corners of the
world, and the city that would some night or other vanish suddenly,
leaving bare sea-ripple to say 'Where? where?' as they rolled over. I
would have seen her marry my father happily. She was like rest and dreams
to me, soft sea and pearls. We entered into an arrangement to correspond
for life. Her name was Clara Goodwin; she requested me to go always to
the Horse Guards to discover in what part of the world Colonel Goodwin
might be serving when I wanted to write to her. I, in return, could give
no permanent address, so I related my history from the beginning. 'To
writ