and cheeks like blood-red anemones, a slender waist with dimples laced and a navel holding an ounce of the unguent benzoin, thighs like bolsters stuffed with ostrich-down, and between them what the tongue fails to set forth and at mention whereof the tears jet forth. Brief it was as it were she to whom the poet alluded in these two couplets, "From her hair is Night, from her forehead Noon * From her side-face Rose; from her lip wine boon: From her Union Heaven, her Severance Hell: * Pearls from her teeth; from her front full Moon." And how excellent is the saying of another bard,[FN#476] "A Moon she rises, Willow-wand she waves * Breathes ambergris and gazeth a gazelle. Meseems that sorrow wooes my heart and wins * And when she wends makes haste therein to dwell. Her face is fairer than the Stars of Wealth[FN#477] * And sheeny brows the crescent Moon excel." And quoth a third also, "They shine fullest Moons, unveil Crescent-bright; * Sway tenderest Branches and turn wild kine; 'Mid which is a Dark-eyed for love of whose charms * The Sailors[FN#478] would joy to be ground low-li'en." So Nur al-Din turned to her at once and clasping her to his bosom, sucked first her upper lip and then her under lip and slid his tongue between the twain into her mouth. Then he rose to her and found her a pearl unthridden and a filly none but he had ridden. So he abated her maidenhead and had of her amorous delight and there was knitted between them a love-bond which might never know breach nor severance.[FN#479] He rained upon her cheeks kisses like the falling of pebbles into water, and struck with stroke upon stroke, like the thrusting of spears in battle brunt; for that Nur al-Din still yearned after clipping of necks and sucking of lips and letting down of tress and pressing of waist and biting of cheek and cavalcading on breast with Cairene buckings and Yamani wrigglings and Abyssinian sobbings and Hindí pamoisons and Nubian lasciviousness and Rífí leg-liftings[FN#480] and Damiettan moanings and Sa'ídí[FN#481] hotness and Alexandrian languishment[FN#482] and this damsel united in herself all these virtues, together with excess of beauty and loveliness, and indeed she was even as saith of her the poet, "This is she I will never forget till I die * Nor draw near but to those who to her draw nigh. A being for semblance like Moon at full * Praise her Maker, her Modeller glorify! Tho' be sore my sin seeking love-liesse * On esperance-day ne'er repent can I; A couplet reciting which none can know * Save the youth who in couplets and rhymes shall cry, 'None weeteth love but who bears its load * Nor passion, save pleasures and pains he aby.'" So Nur al-Din lay with the damsel through the night in solace and delight,—And Shahrazad perceived the dawn of day and ceased saying her permitted say. When it was the Eight Hundred and Seventy-fifth Night,