time before I could fix my attention on what I read; but after a while, the interest the book had previously excited returned, and I became at length so engrossed by the incidents of the story, as to forget the festival, the procession, the tiger, and the elephant, as much as if they had never before entered my head. "After some hours passed in this intellectual banquet, I waked from my day dream, and I thought again of the spectacle with a feeling bordering on indifference. I walked towards the house, where all appeared to be still and silent as a desert. I entered it, and of the forty or fifty menials belonging to it, not one was to be seen. Those who were not in attendance on the family, had sought some respite from their ordinary labours. The Zenana then caught my eye, and I felt irresistibly impelled to enter it. I used great caution, however, looking around me in every direction as I proceeded there. I found the same silence and desertion as in the other parts of the mansion. I passed through a sitting-room into a long gallery, with which the bed-chambers of the ladies communicated. The doors were all open, and the whole interior of their apartments exhibited so strange a medley of unseemly objects, and such utter disorder, as materially to affect my opinion of female delicacy, and to damp my desire of becoming acquainted with my cousins. I passed on, with a feeling of disappointment bordering on disgust, when I came to a room which went far to redeem the character of the sex in my estimation. Here all was neatness and propriety: every thing was either in place, or only enough out of it to indicate the recent occupation of the room, or to show the taste or talent of the occupant; such as a book left half open at one end of an ottoman, and a piece of embroidery at the other. The flowers too, which decorated the room, showed by their freshness that they had not long left their beds. I could not help stopping to survey a scene which accorded so well with my previous notions of female refinement. At the end of the gallery was a veranda, facing the east, and surrounded by lattices. In this were a number of flower-pots, arranged with the same air of neatness and taste as had been conspicuous in the chamber. I entered it, for the purpose of looking into the flower-garden, with which it communicated; and on approaching the lattice, I saw, seated in an alcove not far from the veranda, a face and form that struck me as being the most beautiful I had ever beheld. I remained for some time riveted to the spot, but soon found myself irresistibly impelled to get a nearer view of the lovely object. With as light a step and as little noise as possible, I descended into the garden from the veranda, and approaching the alcove on the side where its foliage was thickest, I found that the beauty, of which I had before thought so highly, did not appear less on a closer survey. The vision on which I gazed in silent rapture, a maiden, who,