ckly brought him to the
gate of the harem-garden.

That day was a busy, stirring one in Cambyses' harem. In order that the
women might look their very best, Boges had commanded that they should
all be taken to the bath before the banquet. He therefore went at once
to that wing of the palace, which contained the baths for the women.

While he was still at some distance a confused noise of screaming,
laughing, chattering and tittering reached his ears. In the broad porch
of the large bathing-room, which had been almost overheated, more than
three hundred women were moving about in a dense cloud of steam.

[We read in Diodorus XVII. 77. that the king of Persia had as many
wives as there are days in the year. At the battle of Issus,
Alexander the Great took 329 concubines, of the last Darius,
captive.]

The half-naked forms floated over the warm 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.
T