, to the fatalism
with which we Easterns are familiarized from our babyhood.

"My captor was no novice at the business of selling a girl, neither was
he a stranger to the house to which he had taken me. For, after
breakfast, he showed me into a little room with one quaint, Arabesque
window. In this room there was a bath, and every toilette requisite,
while, from a tin box that he brought in, he took out a number of most
exquisite outer and under garments. Telling me to make myself as
beautiful-looking as I knew how, he presently left me.

"I am afraid that for a time I was too overwhelmed to do more than
weep. Then as I remembered that it would be the worse for me if I
angered my master, I bathed and anointed myself, though I remember how
once I paused, as I scented my body, and said, through my blinding
tears: 'This is like preparing myself for a sacrificial altar.'

"I was sitting an hour later, on an ottoman in the room outside the
bath-room, when I heard voices, and steps, and a moment later my
master, accompanied by a little tub of a man, with fatted-hog kind of
face, greasy-looking, and wrinkled with fat, out of which peered two
tiny black eyes--like currants stuck in a bladder of lard--and
twinkling most villainously, entered the room.

"He was very richly dressed, and bore the name of Osman Mahmed, and, as
I afterwards learned, he was very high in office and in favour with the
Sultan. He was fabulously rich, and, excepting the Sultan, had the
most extensive harem in the city.

"I had, as a child, learned the Turkish tongue, and had no difficulty
in following all that passed between the seller and buyer. Then after
being lightly pinched, pressed, and squeezed, and ogled, the bargain
was struck, the money for my purchase was paid, and my captor was
instructed to take me, veiled, to the purchaser's palace at two o'clock
that afternoon.

"I was taken, as arranged, to the Palace, and given in charge of the
head eunuch. A few minutes later, two female slaves took me to a large
dressing-room. Here I was bathed again, and sprayed with a very
valuable perfume, a curious blending of rose and patchouli.

"I have three crosses tatooed on my body. Each cross consists of
eleven blue dots, one on each of my shoulders, and one on my breast,
and I noticed a look of horror come into the faces of the two
slave-women who were attending me, but neither of them asked any
question of me.

"My hair was well-groomed,