arm pavement like a motley crowd
of phantoms. Their thin silken garments were wet through and clung to
their delicate figures, and a warm rain descended upon them from the roof
of the bath, rising up again in vapor when it reached the floor.

Groups of handsome women, ten or twenty together, lay gossiping saucily
in one part of the room; in another two king's wives were quarrelling
like naughty children. One beauty was screaming at the top of her voice
because she had received a blow from her neighbor's dainty little
slipper, while another was lying in lazy contemplation, still as death,
on the damp, warm floor. Six Armenians were standing together, singing a
saucy love-song in their native language with clear-toned voices, and a
little knot of fair-haired Persians were slandering Nitetis so fearfully,
that a by-stander would have fancied our beautiful Egyptian was some
awful monster, like those nurses used to frighten children.

Naked female slaves moved about through the crowd, carrying on their
heads well-warmed cloths to throw over their mistresses. The cries of the
eunuchs, who held the office of door-keepers, and were continually urging
the women to greater haste,--the screeching calls of those whose slaves
had not yet arrived,--the penetrating perfumes and the warm vapor
combined to produce a motley, strange and stupefying scene.

A quarter of an hour later, however, the king's wives presented a very
different spectacle.

They lay like roses steeped in dew, not asleep, but quite still and
dreaming, on soft cushions placed along the walls of an immense room. The
wet perfumes still lay on their undried and flowing hair, and nimble
female slaves were busied in carefully wiping away, with little bags made
of soft camels' hair, the slightest outward trace of the moisture which
penetrated deep into the pores of the skin.

Silken coverlets were spread over their weary, beautiful limbs, and a
troop of eunuchs took good care that the dreamy repose of the entire body
should not be disturbed by quarrelsome or petulant individuals. Their
efforts, however, were seldom so successful as to-day, when every one
knew that a disturbance of the peace would be punished by exclusion from
the banquet. They had probably been lying a full hour in this dreamy
silence, when the sound of a gong produced another transformation.

The reposing figures sprang from their cushions, a troop of female slaves
pressed into the hall, the beauties