the queen-apparent, or
next in succession, was spread by the portal. In the Zono, the newly-
widowed queen reposed furthest from it.

But alas for all method where thirty wives are concerned.
Notwithstanding these excellent arrangements, the mature result of
ages of progressive improvement in the economy of the royal seraglios
in Willamilla, it must needs be related, that at times the order of
precedence became confused, and was very hard to restore.

At intervals, some one of the wives was weeded out, to the no small
delight of the remainder; but to their equal vexation her place would
soon after be supplied by some beautiful stranger; who assuming the
denomination of the vacated Night of the Moon, thenceforth commenced
her monthly revolutions in the king's infallible calendar.

In constant attendance, was a band of old men; woe-begone, thin of
leg, and puny of frame; whose grateful task it was, to tarry in the
garden of Donjalolo's delights, without ever touching the roses.
Along with innumerable other duties, they were perpetually kept
coming and going upon ten thousand errands; for they had it in strict
charge to obey the slightest behests of the damsels; and with all
imaginable expedition to run, fly, swim, or dissolve into impalpable
air, at the shortest possible notice.

So laborious their avocations, that none could discharge them
for more than a twelvemonth, at the end of that period giving up the
ghost out of pure exhaustion of the locomotive apparatus. It was this
constant drain upon the stock of masculine old age in the glen, that
so bethinned its small population of gray-beards and hoary-heads. And
any old man hitherto exempted, who happened to receive a summons to
repair to the palace, and there wait the pleasure of the king: this
unfortunate, at once suspecting his doom, put his arbor in order;
oiled and suppled his joints; took a long farewell of his friends;
selected his burial-place; and going resigned to his fate, in due
time expired like the rest.

Had any one of them cast about for some alleviating circumstance, he
might possibly have derived some little consolation from the thought,
that though a slave to the whims of thirty princesses, he was
nevertheless one of their guardians, and as such, he might
ingeniously have concluded, their superior. But small consolation
this. For the damsels were as blithe as larks, more playful than
kittens; never looking sad and sentimental, projecting clandes