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The young prince gritted his row of white teeth and flashed his slumbering eyes–and they could flash–blaze sometimes–with a fire that scorched. Yuleima would be his, unsullied in his own eyes and the world’s, or she should remain in the little white house on the brown hill and continue to blur her beautiful eyes with the tears of her grief.

Then the favorite slave and the faithful caique-ji–the one who found the little cove even on the darkest night–put their heads together–two very cunning and wise heads, one black and wrinkled and the other sun-tanned and yellow–with the result that one night a new odalisque, a dark-skinned, black-haired houri, the exact opposite of the fair-skinned, fair-haired Yuleima, joined the coterie in the harem of the palace of the prince. She had been bought with a great price and smuggled into Stamboul, the story ran, a present from a distinguished friend of his father, little courtesies like this being common in Oriental countries, as one would send a bottle of old Madeira from his cellar or a choice cut of venison from his estate, such customs as is well known being purely a matter of geography.

The chief blackamoor, a shambling, knock-kneed, round-shouldered, swollen-paunched apology for a man, with blistered, cracked lips, jaundiced pig eyes, and the skin of a terrapin, looked her all over, grunted his approval, and with a side-lunge of his fat empty head, indicated the divan which was to be hers during the years of her imprisonment.

One night some words passed between the two over the division of bonbons, perhaps, or whose turn it was to take afternoon tea with the prince–it had generally been the new houri’s, resulting in considerable jealousy and consequent discord–or some trifle of that sort (Joe had never been in a harem, and was therefore indefinite), when the blackamoor, to punctuate his remarks, slashed the odalisque across her thinly covered shoulders with a knout–a not uncommon mode of enforcing discipline, so Joe assured me.

Then came the great scene of the third act–always the place for it, so dramatists say.

The dark-skinned houri sprang up, rose to her full height, her eyes blazing, and facing her tormentor, cried:

“You blackguard”–a true statement–“do you know who I am?”

“Yes, perfectly; you are Yuleima, the daughter of the Bagdad merchant.”

The fourth act takes place on the outskirts of Stamboul, in a small house surrounded by a high wall which connects with the garden of a mosque. The exposure by the eunuch had resulted in an investigation by the palace clique, which extended to the Bagdad merchant and his family, who, in explanation, not only denounced her as an ungrateful child, cursing her for her opposition to her sovereign’s will, but denied all knowledge of her whereabouts. They supposed, they pleaded, that she had thrown herself into the Bosphorus at the loss of her lover. Then followed the bundling up of Yuleima in the still watches of the night; her bestowal at the bottom of a caique, her transfer to Stamboul, and her incarceration in charge of an attendant in a deserted house belonging to the mosque. The rumor was then set on foot that it was unlawful to look steadily into the waters of the Bosphorus or to attempt the salvage of any derelict body floating by.

The prince made another assault on his hair and tightened his fingers, this time with a movement as if he was twisting them round somebody’s throat, but he made no outcry. It is hard to kick against the pricks in some lands.

He did not believe the bow-string pillow-case and solid-shot story, but he knew that he should never look upon her face again. What he did believe was that she had been taken to some distant city and there sold.

For days he shut himself up in his palace. Then, having overheard a conversation in his garden between two eunuchs–placed there for that purpose–he got together a few belongings, took his faithful caique-ji, and travelled a-field. If what he had heard was true she was in or near Damascus. Here would he go. If, after searching every nook and cranny, he failed to find her, he would return and carry out his sovereign’s commands and marry the princess–a woman he had never laid his eyes on and who might be as ugly as sin and as misshapen as Yuleima was beautiful. It was while engaged in this fruitless search that he met Joseph, to whom he had poured out his heart (so Joe assured me, with his hand on his shirt-front), hoping to enlist his sympathies and thus gain his assistance.