"The devout women, surprized to find their heads down, and their heels up in the air, at first covered themselves with their hands: but this attention made them lose their poise, and stumble in their walks. By the advice of the Bramins, they afterwards tied their petticoats about their legs with little black ribbons. The gay part of the sex found this expedient ridiculous, and publickly declared, that it incommoded their respiration, and threw them into the vapours. This prodigy was attended with happy consequences; it occasioned a number of marriages, or somewhat like them, and a crowd of conversions. All those, who had disagreeable buttocks, ran headlong into the religious party, and took little black ribbons. Four missions of Bramins would not have made so many proselytes. "We had scarcely got rid of this trial, when we underwent another, less universal indeed, but not less instructive. The young girls, one and all, from thirteen to eighteen, nineteen, twenty years of age, and upwards, rose on a fine summer's morning, the middle finger caught, guess where, madam?" says Selim to the favorite. "It was not in their mouth, nor in their ear, nor infine, _à la Turque_. Their disease was easily guess'd, and the remedy quickly applied. From that time may our custom be dated of marrying children, who are fit for nothing but dressing their dolls. "Another blessing: Kanaglou's court swarmed with _Petits-maitres_, and I had the honour to be of the number. One day as I was entertaining them with the young French nobility, I perceived our shoulders working upwards, till they became higher than our heads: but that was not all; in an instant we all fell to whirling about on one heel." "And what rarity was there in that?" said the favorite. "Nothing, madam," replied Selim, "but that the first metamorphosis is the origin of the round shoulders, so much in vogue in your infancy; and the second, that of the scoffers, whose reign is not yet over. Then, as now, a discourse was begun to some one person, which by a sudden twirl on the heel, was continued to a second, and finished to a third, to whom it became half unintelligible, half impertinent. "Another time we all found our selves short sighted, and were forced to have recourse to Bion: the rogue made us pay ten sequins for glasses, which we continued to use, even after recovering our sight. Thence come, madam, the opera spy glasses.