desert, where at last he found his arrow at an enormous distance from the
shooting line, and there was the desert all about him, and the sweetest
fairy ever imagined going to show herself to him in the ground under his
feet. In his absence I really hungered for him, and was jealous.

During this Arabian life, we sat on a carpet that flew to the Continent,
where I fell sick, and was cured by smelling at an apple; and my father
directed our movements through the aid of a telescope, which told us the
titles of the hotels ready to receive us. As for the cities and
cathedrals, the hot meadows under mountains, the rivers and the castles-
they were little more to me than an animated book of geography, opening
and shutting at random; and travelling from place to place must have
seemed to me so much like the life I had led, that I was generally as
quick to cry as to laugh, and was never at peace between any two
emotions. By-and-by I lay in a gondola with a young lady. My father
made friends fast on our travels: her parents were among the number, and
she fell in love with me and enjoyed having the name of Peribanou, which
I bestowed on her for her delicious talk of the blue and red-striped
posts that would spout up fountains of pearls if they were plucked from
their beds, and the palaces that had flown out of the farthest corners of
the world, and the city that would some night or other vanish suddenly,
leaving bare sea-ripple to say 'Where? where?' as they rolled over.
I would have seen her marry my father happily. She was like rest and
dreams to me, soft sea and pearls. We entered into an arrangement to
correspond for life. Her name was Clara Goodwin; she requested me to go
always to the Horse Guards to discover in what part of the world Colonel
Goodwin might be serving when I wanted to write to her. I, in return,
could give no permanent address, so I related my history from the
beginning. 'To write to you would be the same as writing to a river,'
she said; and insisted that I should drop the odious name of Roy when I