For days, nay, for weeks, did poor Nuna thus appear, a laughing-stock. She implored permission to leave the court, and return to her wretched home in Cashmere; but that was refused. In the midst of the Mohurrim, she suddenly disappeared. There were none to inquire for her.[1] [Footnote 1: Private Life of an Eastern King.] Oh, they may say what they please about the irresistible march of civilization, and clearing the way for Webster's Spelling-Book,--about pumps for Afric's sunny fountains, and Fulton ferry-boats for India's coral strand; but there's nothing in what the Atlantic Cable gives, like that it takes away from the heart of the man who has looked the Sphinx in the face and dreamed with the Brahmin under his own banian. Spare the shrinking Nunas of our poetry your Europe-fashions! Because the De Sautys are scientifically virtuous, shall there be no more barbaric cakes and ale for us? Because they are joined to their improved Shanghaes, must we let our phoenixes alone? Must we deny our crocodiles when they preach to us codfish? And shall we abstain from crying, "In the name of the Prophet, figs!" in order that they may bawl, "In the name of Brother Jonathan, doughnuts"? Yes, the world is visibly shrinking in the hard grip of commerce, and the magic and the marvels that filled our childish souls with adventurous longing are fading away in the change. Let us make haste, then, before it is too late,--before the very Sphinx is guessed, and the Boodh himself baptized in Croton water; and, like the Dutchmen in Hans Christian Andersen's story, who put on the galoches of happiness and stepped out into the Middle Ages, let us slip our feet into the sandals of imagination and step out into the desert or the jungle. One who expressed his Oriental experiences in an epic of fresh and thrilling sensations has written,--"If a man be not born of his mother with a natural Chifney bit in his mouth, there comes to him a time for loathing the wearisome ways of society,--a time for not liking tamed people,--a time for not dancing quadrilles,--a time for pretending that Milton, and Shelley, and all sorts of mere dead people are greater in death than the first living lord of the treasury,--a time, in short, for scoffing and railing, for speaking lightly of the opera, and all our most cherished institutions. A little while you are free and unlabelled, like the ground you compass; but civilization is coming, and coming; you and your much-loved waste-lands will be surely inclosed, and sooner or later you will be brought down to a state of utter usefulness,--the ground will be curiously sliced into acres and roods and perches, and you, for all you sit so smartly on your saddle, you will be caught, you will be taken up from travel, as a colt from grass, to be trained, and matched, and run.