When I had seated myself, the dancer suddenly suffered her arms to fall by her side, and flinging the tambourine to one of the singing women, she clapped her hands, and a couple of slaves entered with coffee. One bore a large silver salver, from which depended a napkin of gold tissue, richly fringed, with the tiny cups of glittering porcelain, and the silver coffee-holders neatly arranged upon its surface; and the other carried a weighty sherbet-vase of wrought silver, shaped as classically as that of Hebe herself. I never saw any woman so light or so graceful as that lovely dancing-girl. She had the spring of a sylph, and the foot of a fawn. As she presented the coffee, she laid her hand first upon her lips and then upon her head, with an elegance which I have seldom seen equalled; and then bounding back into her place, she twirled the tambourine in the air with the playfulness of a child; and, having denoted the measure, returned it to one of the women, who immediately commenced a wild chant, half song and half recitative, which was at times caught up in chorus by the others, and at times wailed out by the dancer only, as she regulated the movements of her willow-like figure to the modulations of the music. The Turkish women dance very little with the feet; it is the grace and art displayed in the carriage of the body and arms which form the perfection of their dancing; the rapid snapping of the fingers, meanwhile, producing the effect of castanets. Even at the risk of making a portrait gallery of my chapter, I must mention the magnificent Saïryn Hanoum, who shortly afterwards entered the apartment. She was in the autumn of her beauty, for she must have been eight or nine and twenty, at which period the women of the East begin to decline. But what an autumn! Could you only have clipped the wings of Time for the future, you would not have wished her to be a day younger. She was dark, very dark: almost a Bohemian in complexion; but you saw the rich blood coursing along her veins, through the clear skin; her eyes were like the storm-cloud, from which the lightning flashes at intervals; her hair was as black as midnight; her teeth were dazzling: and her brow—it was a brow which should have been circled by a diadem, for it was already stamped with Nature’s own regality. She was tall, even stately; and the dignity of her step accorded well with the fire of her dark eye, and the proud expression that sat upon her lip, and dilated her thin delicate nostril. Her costume was as striking as her person; and, had she studied during a century how best to enhance her beauty, she could never have more perfectly succeeded. Her vest and trowsers were of the most snowy muslin; she wore neither diamond nor pearl; but the handkerchief was fastened about her head with a chain of large gold coins, which being threaded upon a silken cord, formed a fringe that rested upon her forehead; and a necklace of the same material fell low upon her bosom.