astrologers, where the study has been fortified by a previous knowledge of man, his temperaments, and the innate and external characteristics of passions, of virtue, and of vice. She gave him the name of Selim, and sent word to say his star agreed with hers very well. This was good news for Fatôom, as it was equivalent to Lady Hester's taking charge of the infant.
The cradle had already been prepared: it was of wood, painted green, something like a trough, and perforated at the bottom, as is usual in the East. A tube of wood with a bowl to it, exactly of the form of a tobacco-pipe, is tied to the child's waist, a rude but ingenious contrivance to save trouble to the nurse, the bowl serving as the immediate recipient, and the tube passing through the side of the cradle.[1]
March 7.—This being Wednesday, Lady Hester, as usual, was invisible. What she did on these myste-
- ↑ In the cottages of Mount Lebanon there are many things occurring daily which would greatly surprise an English practitioner. A luxation of the shoulder-joint in an infant, real or supposed, was cured, they told me, by taking the child by the wrist and swinging it round with its feet off the ground, until the bone got into place again. I assisted, for the second time, at the cure of a sore throat, in a man thirty-six years of age, who suffered a pocket-handkerchief to be drawn tightly round his neck until his face turned black and he was half strangled. The man declared the next day he was well, and the operator assured me it was a never-failing remedy.
