procession, being caught with the charms of the lovely Pissimissi: he
immediately began the song of songs extempore; and what he had seen--I
mean, all that came out of the humming-bird's throat had made such a
jumble in his ideas, that there was nothing so unlike to which he did
not compare all Pissimissi's beauties. As he sung his canticles too
to no tune, and god knows had but a bad voice, they were far from
comforting Pissimissi: the elephant had torn her best bib and apron, and
she cried and roared, and kept such a squalling, that though Solomon
carried her in his arms, and showed her all the fine things in the
temple, there was no pacifying her. The queen of Sheba, who was playing
at backgammon with the high-priest, and who came every October to
converse with Solomon, though she did not understand a word of Hebrew,
hearing the noise, came running out of her dressing-room; and seeing the
king with a squalling child in his arms, asked him peevishly, if it
became his reputed wisdom to expose himself with his bastards to all the
court? Solomon, instead of replying, kept singing, "We have a little
sister, and she has no breasts;" which so provoked the Sheban princess,
that happening to have one of the dice-boxes in her hand, she without
any ceremony threw it at his head. The enchantress, whom I mentioned
before, and who, though invisible, had followed Pissimissi, and drawn
her into her train of misfortunes, turned the dice-box aside, and
directed it to Pissimissi's nose, which being something flat, like
madame de ----'s, it stuck there, and being of ivory, Solomon ever after
compared his beloved's nose to the tower that leads to Damascus. The
queen, though ashamed of her behaviour, was not in her heart sorry for
the accident; but when she found that it only encreased the monarch's
passion, her contempt redoubled; and calling him a thousand old fools to
herself, she ordered her post-chaise and drove away in a fury, without
leaving sixpence for the servants; and nobody knows what became of her
or her kingdom, which has never been heard of since.