The first time that the pretty Yasumi[8] Hanoum peeped through her lattice at the handsome soldier, the blood rushed to her brow, and her heart beat quick, though she knew not wherefore. The young beauty led a lonely life, for she was motherless, and her father was a stern man, who had no sympathy with womanly tastes; and, satisfied with providing for her daily necessities, never troubled himself further. It was by no means extraordinary, therefore, that she amused her idleness with watching the motions of the stranger; nor that, by dint of observing him, she ere long discovered that he was rapidly becoming an object of interest to her heart.
Then followed all the manœuvres of an Eastern beauty, who has no means of communication with the other sex, save those which her woman-wit enables her to invent. A shower of lavender buds, flung from the narrow opening of the lattice upon his head, first attracted the attention of the gallant Moslem to the Emir’s harem; nor was it diminished by a glimpse of one of the whitest little hands in the world, which, ere it closed the aperture, waved a graceful salutation that could be meant only for himself.
But the youth knew that he was playing a dangerous game, and he consequently moved away without making any answering gesture; and resolved to stroll in the other direction, rather than encourage the advances which had been made to him. Once or twice, he accordingly walked as far as the slipper-stall of a Jew merchant; but this uninteresting individual squinted hideously, and smoked tobacco of so odious a quality that it half suffocated the more fastidious Osmanli. Of course there was no persevering in such an encounter, and he was consequently compelled to resume his original line of march; being the more readily induced to do so by importunate memories of the little white hand which had showered down upon him the sweet-scented lavender buds; although he did not suffer himself to suspect that such was the case; and lest he should be addressed from the dangerous lattice, and thus become more deeply involved in the adventure, he amused himself by singing one of Sultan Mahmoud’s ballads in his best style.
But, unfortunately for the success of this laudable intention, the Imperial poet has written none but love-ditties; and the young soldier chanced inadvertently to fix upon one in which an anxious suitor calls upon his mistress to reveal to him the beauty that he has hitherto beheld only in his dreams—he invokes the moon from behind the clouds that veil it—the hidden leaf from the heart of the rose where it is folded—and loses himself in hyperbole on the subject of the concealed loveliness on which he longs to look.