“The most charming book in all the world of literature is the collection of tales known to common fame as the _Arabian Nights_. Their charm consists in the total freedom from all restraints of verities, of either probabilities or possibilities. Events occur in dreamlike succession, and transformations take place with such delicious swiftness and ease that, if you read the story as you should, with forgetfulness of self, and without any of the folly of critical judgment, you are removed into another world than this--a world of refreshing liberty, wherein thought has no bounds and imagination flows in glorious revelry. “That which the unknown Saracen story-teller created in words and fancies, this late nineteenth century seeks to create in reality, by the aid of wealth and steam and electricity. It does not succeed. But it comes so near to success that we may wonder and admire, and for a moment at a time we can forget that the result is artificial, not natural, and that it is a miracle of human invention which dazzles and astonishes our senses. All this by way of introduction to my letter.... “The scene changed suddenly. The train emerged into a blaze of electric light. By this blaze of light you could see, high in the air and stretching a thousand feet to right and left, bright domes and minarets, appearing and disappearing with all the swiftness of magic. It was bewildering. A few steps lead into the blinding light of the grand hall of the new hotel, a wilderness of all that is gorgeous in works of modern art. Rich furniture in gold and ebony, velvets, tapestries, grand vases of porcelain, massive figures in pottery, bronzes in groups, small and of life size, oil-paintings, works of masters, etchings, engravings, carvings, in short, countless examples of the most costly and superb art productions of the age, under a flood of light from a hundred electric bands; all this bursting on the gaze of the traveller at the end of his journey, it forms what may well be considered a modern artificial approximation to one of the transformations in dreams of the Saracens.