on those places which are marked as dangerous; and thus many perish, like
moths that sacrifice themselves in the candle flame. They have, therefore,
parties of men, with their dresses stuffed with air-cushions, whose duty
it is to watch on the ice, ready to plunge in whenever it breaks and any
one is immersed."

[8] Bishop Heber, in his journal, also mentions the wonder of his
Bengali servants on their first sight of a piece of ice in
Himalaya, and their regret on finding that they could not carry it
home to Calcutta as a curiosity.

The national theatres were now open for the winter, and the Khan paid a
visit to Covent-Garden; but he gives no particulars of the performances
which he witnessed, though he was greatly struck by the splendour of the
lighting and decoration, and still more by the almost magical celerity
with which the changes of scenery were effected. The scanty notice taken
of these matters, may perhaps be partly accounted for by the extraordinary
fascination produced in the mind of the khan by the charms of one of the
houris on the stage--whose name, though he does not mention it, our
readers will probably have no difficulty in supplying; and it may be
doubted whether the warmest panegyrics of the most ardent of her
innumerable admirers ever soared quite so high a pitch into the regions of
hyperbole as the Oriental flights of the khan, who exhausts, in the praise
of her attractions, all the imagery of the eastern poets. She is described
as "cypress-waisted, rose-cheeked, fragrant as amber, and sweet as sugar,
a stealer of hearts, who unites the magic of talismans with loveliness
transcending that of the _peris!_ When she bent the soft arch of her
eyebrows, she pierced the heart through and through with the arrows of her
eyelashes; and when she smiled, the heart of the most rigid ascetic was
intoxicated! She was gorgeously arrayed, and covered all over with