At the entrance to a showman's travelling booth, a blind slave, for four obols a day, was pumping up the water which produced this extraordinary harmony. Agamemnon dragged his companion towards the booth, a great tent with blue awnings sprinkled with silver tinsel. A lantern lighted the black-board on which the order of the programme was chalked up, in Syriac and Greek. An oppressive atmosphere of garlic and lamp-oil prevailed inside, where, beside the organ, there struck up the wailing of two harsh flutes, while a negro, rolling the whites of his eyes, thrummed on an Arab drum. A dancer was skipping to and fro on a tight-rope, keeping time to the music with his hands, and singing the latest street song: Huc, huc, convenite nunc... Spatolocinædi! Pedem tendite Cursum addite... This starveling mountebank was old, impudent, and repulsively cheery. Drops of sweat, mixed with paint, were trickling from his shaven face. His wrinkles, plastered with white lead, looked like the cracks in a wall when rain has washed off the lime. When he withdrew, the flutes and the organ ceased, and on the platform a fifteen-year-old girl appeared. She was to perform the _Cordax_, a celebrated licentious dance adored by the mob. Fathers of the Church might anathematise, and Roman laws interdict this dance, but both did so in vain. Everywhere the Cordax was danced as before by rich and poor, by street-dancers as well as by wives of senators. Agamemnon murmured with enthusiasm: "What a divinely pretty girl!" Thanks to jostling by his companions he had reached a place in the front rank of spectators. The slender bronze body of the Nubian was only veiled round the hips by a light and transparent rose-coloured scarf. Her hair was wound on the top of her head in close fine curls, like those of Ethiopian women. Her face was of the severest Egyptian type, recalling that of the Sphinx. She began to dance in careless fashion, as if already out-wearied. Above her head she swung heavy steel bells, castanets or "crotals,"--swung them lazily and loosely. But the movements became more emphatic, and suddenly under long lashes yellow eyes shone out, clear and bright as the eyes of a leopardess. She straightened her body. The steel crotals shook with such a challenge in their piercing sound that the crowd shivered and became still. The damsel whirled rapidly, vivid, slender, supple as a serpent; her nostrils dilated, a strange cry came crooning from her throat, and at each sharp movement her brown bosom shook and trembled within its almost invisible meshes of fine green silk.