on the
cream-tarts; if my father subjected me to an interrogation concerning my
lessons, he was the dread African magician to whom must be surrendered
my acquisition of the ring and the musty old lamp. We were quite in the
habit of meeting fair Persians. He would frequently ejaculate that he
resembled the Three Calendars in more respects than one. To divert me
during my recovery from measles, he one day hired an actor in a theatre,
and put a cloth round his neck, and seated him in a chair, rubbed his
chin with soap, and played the part of the Barber over him, and I have
never laughed so much in my life. Poor Mrs. Waddy got her hands at her
sides, and kept on gasping, 'Oh, sir! oh!' while the Barber hurried away
from the half-shaved young man to consult his pretended astrolabe in
the next room, where we heard him shouting the sun's altitude, and
consulting its willingness for the impatient young man to be further
shaved; and back he came, seeming refreshed to have learnt the sun's
favourable opinion, and gabbling at an immense rate, full of barber's
business. The servants were allowed to be spectators; but as soon as
the young man was shaved, my father dismissed them with the tone of a
master. No wonder they loved him. Mrs. Waddy asked who could help it?

I remember a pang I had when she spoke of his exposure to the risk of
marrying again; it added a curious romantic 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 recei