At such an hour as this the eunuch seated in the shadow of the trees, his eyes fixed upon the soft light issuing from a neighboring kiosk, gnaws out his heart and touches with trembling fingers his dagger hilt, and the poor little maid, stolen and sold into bondage, gazes from the window of her lofty cell with streaming eyes upon the serene horizon of Asia, thinking with unutterable longing of the cabin where she was born and the peaceful valley where her fathers lie buried. At this hour, too, the galley-slave laden with chains, the mute stained with blood, the despised miserable dwarf, reflect with a thrill of dismay upon the infinity of space which separates them from that being before whom they all must bow, and passionately interrogate the “_hidden powers_” as to why they must be deprived of liberty, speech, and the ordinary shape of the human form, while everything is given to one man. And this, too, is the hour in which the neglected and unhappy weep, while those who are great and successful are haunted with misgivings as they think uneasily of the future. In some of the buildings lights are still burning, illuminating the pale, anxious brows of the treasurers bending over their accounts. Odalisques, embittered by neglect, toss restlessly among their pillows, vainly seeking sleep. Janissaries lie stretched out upon the ground, the savage smile upon their bronzed faces telling of dreams of carnage and plunder. Through those thin walls come voluptuous sighs, sobs, broken expostulations. In one kiosk flows the accursed liquor amid a circle of dishevelled revellers; in another a wretched sultana, mother for but one short moment, stifles her shrieks beneath the pillows that she may not see her child’s life-blood flowing from the artery opened by order of the Pâdishah; and in the marble niches of the Bâb-i-Humayûn blood is still dropping from the heads of beys executed at nightfall. Within the loftiest kiosk of the third enclosure there is a room hung with crimson brocade and flooded with soft radiance from a Moorish lamp of chased silver suspended from the cedar-wood roof. Upon a sable-covered couch, surrounded by a magnificent disorder of pearl-embroidered cushions and velvet draperies worked in gold, there sits a beautiful brunette, enveloped in a great white veil, who not many years before conducted her father’s herds across the plains of Arabia. Bending her timid gaze upon the pallid countenance of the third Murad, who reclines half asleep at her feet, she begins in gentle murmuring tones: “Once upon a time there lived in Damascus a merchant named Abu-Eiub, who had accumulated great riches and lived in honor and prosperity. He had one son, who was handsome and who knew all sorts of wonderful things, and his name was Slave of Love, and a daughter who was very beautiful, and she was named Power of Hearts. Now, it came to pass that Abu-Eiub died, and he left all his possessions and all his wealth wrapped up and fastened with seals,