The favourite female slaves of the princes receive the milk in calabashes, and distribute it again to their masters. Beauty amongst the Moors consists in enormous embonpoint; and the young girls are therefore obliged to drink milk to excess; the elder ones take a great quantity of their own accord, but the younger children are compelled by their parents, or by a slave whose office it is, to swallow their allowance. This poor creature commonly takes advantage of the “brief authority” that is granted her, to revenge herself by her cruelty for the tyranny of her masters. I have seen poor little girls crying and rolling on the ground, and even throwing up the milk which they had just drank; neither their cries nor their sufferings making any impression upon the cruel slave, who beat them, pinched them till they bled, and tormented them in a thousand ways, to force them to take the quantity of milk which she thought proper. If their food were heavier, such a system would have fatal consequences; but it is so far from hurting their constitutions, that they grow visibly stronger and fatter. At twelve years old they are enormous, but at twenty or twenty-two they lose their embonpoint; I never saw a woman of that age who was remarkably corpulent. The largest women are reckoned the handsomest. The Moors have no taste for beauty of form or mind; on the contrary, what we consider a capital defect is an attraction with them; they admire women who have the two front teeth of the upper jaw projecting from the mouth; and ambitious mothers employ all possible means, to make their daughters’ teeth grow in that direction. The men, as I have said, feed also on milk; but they drink less than the women. The slaves live upon cows’ milk, and in the season when milk is scarce, they are allowed a small portion of grain, about three quarters of a pound, without milk; at that season they eat only at 11 o’clock at night, when their masters are in bed. Such of the Moors as have young slaves ten or twelve years old, send them to the enclosure where the calves are, at milking time; and from every cow they let them drink a mouthful of milk; which is all the food they receive, so that they suffer much from hunger. When supper is over, the milk which is left is put in a leather bag, called _soucou_, to curdle. In the morning, after the cows are milked, they breakfast as they supped over-night, that is to say upon milk; the difference being that they have less of it, because the calves are allowed to suck in the morning.