Page:Memoirs of the Lady Hester Stanhope.djvu/316

 Mahometans form to those of Europeans? Gambling and noisy revels are out of the question in the tranquil and easy delights in this simple race. Dancing is generally confined to the boys, or to some buffoon who gets up and wriggles about to the music of a small tambourine, beaten with a single stick and producing a dull sound, which they consider musical, and which habit renders not disagreeable even to European ears. Every man smokes his pipe; and a good story-teller (for such a one is rarely wanting in a party of a dozen,) relates some traditionary tale, which absorbs for the time all the faculties of his hearers. The cook was one of this sort, a Christian of the village of Abra, a shrewd fellow, who went by the name of Dyk, or the Cock, from his rather strutting air, or from the vigorous exercise of his authority over his wife, whom he beat every now and then to keep her in proper discipline—a redeeming quality in the eyes of Lady Hester, who otherwise would have dismissed him from her service.

Lady Hester's astrological powers were put to a practical test to-day. Fatôom, one of her maid servants, whose name has frequently occurred in these pages, required my medical services, under the following circumstances. About six years before, having, in league with Zeyneb, a black girl, and some men of the village, robbed her mistress of several valuable effects,