Only those who remember monarchical times can decide how far the creole girl has been changed by the new conditions; the foreigner, of course, has few opportunities for observing her. Does she still possess that exotic charm which in other years lifted her to the throne of empire, and inspired that exquisite white dream in marble which still stands in the Savannah of Fort-de-France--between the Rivière Madame and the Rivière Monsieur? Does she still keep that fine witchery which frightened the foolish Métropole long ago into the utterance of the law that no French official in the colonies should marry a creole? I do not know. But it is sadly true that she is bearing more than her share of the penalty for the errors made by her fathers in the past--those errors of slavery, that have not even yet been expiated. And it is also true that many a fair proud girl--perhaps more than one with princely blood in her veins--seeks escape at last from the dull formality of an aimless and hopeless existence, by returning forever to the convent of her child-days; knowing nothing of the higher joys or deeper pains of life, and so the more innocently eager to transmute into religious ecstasy and penance that strength of love and that divine desire of self-sacrifice for some one's sake which are attributes of woman's soul. ARABESQUES ARABIAN WOMEN Although sensitiveness to beauty--the æsthetic sense--is not in itself a capacity by which the comparative civilization of races may be fully estimated, it is at least an indication of the possession of powers which under favoring circumstances would enable the people possessing it to occupy a high rank in the hierarchy of nations. When found among semi-savage peoples, it gives us the right to believe that such peoples have been or might yet be the founders of civilizations; and in these days, when the study of Oriental history and ethnology is making such rapid progress, especial interest attaches to the evidences of the æsthetic sense in the earliest literature of the nations of the East. In this regard, no Oriental literature possesses so natural a charm as that of the Arabs,--particularly, perhaps, from the fact that in it is preserved every link in the history of the wonderful evolution of the æsthetic sense,--from the primitive desert-chant to the elaborate literature of the Golden Prime of Islam,--from the first camel-skin tents to the glories of Saracenic architecture in Spain and India,--from the simplicity of nomad life between sand and sun, to the luxurious era of El Rashid and El Mamoun, of which the memory still lingers in the world like a breath of perfume, like a golden afterglow, like the throbbing in the brain after some wondrous music has died away. This literature is vast and variform; it were useless to attempt in any limited space to speak, even of the titles of its main branches,--or even to touch ever so lightly upon those branches which deal especially with the sense of the beautiful.