"The virtuous woman, she whose soul is sometimes in her head, sometimes in her heart, but never any where else. "If the soul fixes in the heart, she forms the characters of sensibility, compassion, truth, generosity. If she quits the heart without returning thither, and retires to the head; then she forms those whom we call hardhearted, ungrateful, deceitful, cruel men. "The class of those, in whom the soul visits the head merely as a country-house, where its stay is short, is very numerous. It is composed of _Petits-Maitres_, coquets, musicians, poets, romancers, courtiers, and all those who are called pretty women. Listen to the reasoning of these entities, and you will instantly discern vagabond souls, which are influenced by the different climes they inhabit." "If that be the case," said Selim, "nature has formed many useless things. And yet our sages hold as a constant maxim, that she has produced nothing in vain." "Drop your sages and their lofty expressions," answered Mirzoza; "and as to nature, let us consider her with the eyes of experience only, and we shall learn from her, that she has placed the soul in the body of man, as in a spacious palace, of which she does not always occupy the most beautiful appartment. The head and heart are principally destined for her, as the center of virtue, and the residence of truth: but most commonly she stops on the road, and prefers a garret, a suspicious place, a miserable inn, where she drops asleep in perpetual drunkenness. Ah! If I were allowed for twenty-four hours only, to settle the world according to my fancy, I would divert you with a very strange sight: in a moment I would deprive each soul of the superfluous parts of its habitation; and you would see each individual characterised by the part left him. Thus dancers would be reduced to two feet, or two legs at most; singers to a throat; most women to a Toy; hero's and prize-fighters to an armed hand; certain learned men to a skull without brains; a female gamester should be stinted to two hands incessantly shuffling the cards; a glutton to two jaws always in motion; a coquet to two eyes; a rake to the sole instrument of his passion; the ignorant and lazy to nothing." "If you leave the women any hands at all," interrupted the Sultan, "those men whom you would reduce to the sole instrument of their passions, would be pursued. This chace would be a pleasant sight: and if the sex was as greedy of this game every where else as in Congo, the species would soon be extinct." "But," said Selim to the favorite, "of what would you compose affectionate and sensible women, constant and faithful lovers?" "Of a heart," answered Mirzoza; "and I well know," added she, darting a tender glance on Mangogul, "that, to which mine would wish to be united."