hen accompanied with all the vigorous passion of
youth.

And Eminah knew not that there were such beings as youths in the
world. Excepting her father and her husband, she had never seen a man,
and therefore fancied that other men also had just such white beards
and silvery eyelashes as they. Brought up from the days of her
childhood in the midst of a harem, among women and eunuchs, she had
not the remotest idea of the romantic visions which the hearts of
love-sick girls are wont to form from the contemplation of their
ideals; to her her husband was the most perfect man for whom a
woman's heart had ever beaten, and she clung to him as if he had been
a supernatural being.

In her heart Eminah pictured Ali as one of those beneficent genii who
in the marvellous tales of the Arabs rise up from the bowels of the
earth and the depths of the sea, a hundred times greater than ordinary
men, ten times younger, and a thousand times more powerful, who are
wont to give talismanic rings to their earthly favorites, appearing
before them when they turn this ring in order to instantly gratify
their desires, their wishes; to transport them from place to place
with their huge muscular hands, to make them ride a cock-horse on
their middle fingers, play hide-and-seek with them in the thousand
corners of their vast palaces, watch over them when they sleep,
overwhelm them with heaps and heaps of gifts and treasures, and yet
are gentle and complacent in spite of their immense power. They need
but take one step to crush the towers and bastions of the mightiest
fortress in the dust, and yet they walk so warily as not even to graze
the tiny ant they meet upon their path. Why, once Ali had waded into
the lake up to his waist to rescue two amorously fluttering
butterflies that had fallen into it! Oh! Ali has such a sensitive soul
that he weeps over the bird that has accidentally beaten itself to
death against the bars of its cage; whenever he plucks a flower from
its stalk he always raises it to his lips to beg its pardon; and when
they told him how at the siege of Kilsura all the poor doves were
burned, the tears sparkled in his eyes!

Eminah does not fully know the meaning of a siege; she only grieves
for the poor doves. How they would hover above the burning town in
white clusters amid the black smoke, and fall down into the fire
below!

In reality the matter stood thus: Ali was besieging Kilsura, but could
not take it; the besiegers fought