Thus the Moors had not only laid aside long since their fanatical war-cry of “The Koran or the Sword!” but had adopted many of the usages of chivalry, no longer holding the Christians as dogs, and slaughtering them without quarter given or taken, but setting them at honorable ransom, and even treating them while prisoners on parole as guests on terms of equality, entertaining them at their boards, and holding sacred to them all the rights of hospitality. In no respect, however, had a wider change occurred in the habits of the nation than in the treatment of their women, who, although not certainly admitted to the full liberty of Christian ladies, were by no means immured, as in their native land, in the precincts of the Harem, “to blush unseen, and waste their sweetness on the desert air,” but were permitted, still under the guardianship of duennas, and with their trains of Indian eunuchs, and further protected by their veils from the contamination of unholy glances, to be present at festivals, at tournaments, nay! even at banquets, when none but the members of the family or guests of high consideration were expected to be present. It is not, by the way, a little singular that almost in exact proportion as the Moors enlarged the liberty of their women, by the example of the Spaniards, did the Spaniards contract that of their own bright-eyed ladies, by the example of the Moors; and for many years the rigor of the Spanish duenna was scarcely inferior to that of the Raid of a Moorish harem, or the ladies under charge of the one much more obvious to the gaze of the profane, than the beautiful slaves of the latter. Did not, therefore, the beautiful Leila Ayesha rejoice and exult in the comparative freedom which she enjoyed among the liberal Moors of Spain, which as fitted to enjoy as the favorite child of a wise father, enlightened far beyond the prejudices of his nation or his time? In his own younger days he had been a traveler, had visited Venice and even Madrid, in both of which cities he had been a sojourner in the character of ambassador, and had thus, like the wily Ulysses, “seen the cities of many nations and learned their understandings.” Their languages he spoke fluently: he even read their works, and, although a sincere and faithful Mussulman, he had learned to prize many of the customs, to appreciate the principles, and in some instances to adopt in his heart at least the practices of the Christians.