This favorite, after a reign of three years, having dared to persist in soliciting pardon for a bostangi, who was condemned to lose his hand for having fished fraudulently, during the night, in the fish-ponds of the pacha, the latter, in a moment of rage, had cut off the nose of his beautiful Aysche, and then not desiring to keep her in that state, he had completed the punishment of the trustless bostangi and the refractory slave by uniting them in marriage. A piece of ground, situated on the confines of the city, had been given them as a dowry. Aysche now sold vegetables in the market, where she was known by the name of _Bournouses_ (the noseless.) This example of the instability of the power of favorites had ceased to disturb Baïla, since the Christian had revealed to her the secret of her power. Besides, at the time of the events Aysche was no longer young, which might give rise to the thought, that her decreasing beauty, rather than any other cause, had excited the wrath of her master. Baïla was seventeen years old, with a Georgian head on a Circassian body, the voice of a syren, and the tread of a nymph—what had she to fear? Her will had become that of the pacha. Entirely cemented by habit to her love, he appeared never to think of his other odalisks, except when the Mingrelian, from caprice or petulance, revolted openly against his desires. Then, in the presence of the rebellious beauty, Djezzar would order a slave to carry to an odalisk, whom he designated, a piece of goods, which, according to the Oriental custom, announced the approach of the master, and which in accordance with our method of translating Turkish manners, we have naturalized among us by the phrase of “_throwing the handkerchief_.” Formerly, at the idea of the infidelity which was to be practiced toward her, Baïla fretted and pouted in a corner with a bereaved air. Her small mouth drawn down at the corners, muttered unintelligible complaints and threats; her beautiful black eyes, with their long, vibrating lashes, were half closed, and with her head bent, and the pupils drawn back to the angle of the eyelids, she cast upon the slave, the master, and the brilliant piece of goods, a look full of anger and jealousy. There her audacity ceased. But now, when Djezzar, to avenge himself on her, takes a fancy to be inconstant, she falls upon the stuff and the slave, tears the one and cuffs the other; and if the omnipotent pacha carries out his plan of vengeance, it frequently happens on the next day that as the price of submission, the slave is, on some pretext, bastinadoed, and the favorite of a day driven away in disgrace, too happy to escape, without, like Aysche, leaving her nose within the palace, is sent to the bazaar to become the property of the highest bidder. Such had lately been the fate of the beautiful daughter of Amasia.