For the entertainment of the guests there was a dance of nuptial unveiling and a bout between half-a-dozen Turkish boxers. But it was a decadent and _blaze_ company, and something more piquant was needed for their titillation. This was supplied in the shape of an original dance by the fifteen-year-old _Joseph_, whom my guide describes as "graceful, wild and pungent." He was introduced in a recumbent posture, and asleep, on a covered stretcher, and at first I had the clever idea that he was the customary corpse that appeared at Egyptian feasts to remind the company of their liability to die. But when he woke up and began to dance I saw at once that I was wrong. I now know all about the interpretation of _Joseph's_ dance; but I defy anyone to say at sight and without a showman's assistance what precisely he was after. In the Third Figure (according to my guide-book) "there is in his leaps a feeling of heaviness, as if he were bound to earth, and he stumbles once or twice as one who has missed his goal;" but how was I to guess that this signified that his "searching after God" was still ineffectual? or that when in the Fourth Figure he "leaps with light feet" this meant that "Joseph has found God"? I don't blame the boy for not knowing the rule that forbids one art to trespass on the domain of another; but there is no excuse for Herr Strauss, who must have been well aware that, for the conveyance of any but the most obvious emotions, mute dancing can never be a satisfactory substitute for articulate poetry. However, _Potiphar's_ guests seemed better instructed than I was, for they threw off their apathy and took quite an intelligent interest in _Joseph's_ _pas seul_. Indeed, one young man (the episode escaped me at the dress rehearsal, but I have it in the guide-book)--one young man, "sobbing, buries his head in his hands, upsetting thereby a dish of fruit." As for _Potiphar_, it failed to stir the sombre depths of his abysmal boredom, but his wife, whose ennui had hitherto been of the most profound, began to sit up and take notice, and at the end of the dance she sent for _Joseph_ and supplemented his rather exiguous costume with a gross necklace of jewels, letting her hand linger awhile on his bare neck. Already, it will be seen, she was intrigued with the "unknown divine." _Joseph_, on the contrary, received her attentions without _empressement_.