“Well, my dear little foot, you always flee from me; yet I always took good care of you. I bathed you with perfumed water in a bowl of alabaster; I smoothed your heel with pumice-stone mixed with palm oil; your nails were cut with golden scissors and polished writh a hip¬popotamus tooth; I was careful to select tatbebs for you, painted and embroidered and turned up at the toes, which were the envy of all the young girls in Egypt: you wore on your great toe rings bearing the device of the sacred Scarabaeus; and you supported one of the lightest bodies that a lazy foot could sustain.”
The foot replied, in a pouting and chagrined tone:
“You know well that I do not belong to myself any longer;—I have been bought and paid for; the old merchant knew what he was about; he bore you a grudge for having refused to espouse him;—this is an ill turn which he has done you. The Arab who violated your royal coffin in the subterranean pit of the necropolis of Thebes was sent thither by him: he desired to prevent you from being present at the reunion of the shadowy nations in the cities below. Have you five pieces of gold for my ransom?”
“Alas, no!—my jewels, my rings, my purses of gold and silver, they were all stolen from me,” answered the Princess Hermonthis, with a sob.
Princess Hermonthis
“Princess,” I then exclaimed, “I never retained anybody`s foot un¬justly;—even though you have not got the five louis which it cost me, I present it to you gladly: I should feel unutterably wretched to think that I were the cause of so amiable a person as the Princess Hermonthis being lame.”
I delivered this discourse in a royally gallant, troubadour tone, which must have astonished the beautiful Egyptian girl.
She turned a look of deepest gratitude upon me; and her eyes shone with bluish gleams of light.
She took her foot—which surrendered itself willingly this time— like a woman about to put on her little shoe, and adjusted it to her leg with much skill.
This operation over, she took a few steps about the room, as though to assure herself that she was really no longer lame.
“Ah, how pleased my father will be!—he who was so unhappy be¬cause of my mutilation, and who from the moment of my birth set a whole nation at work to hollow me out a tomb so deep that he might preserve me intact until that last day, when souls must be weighed in the balance of Amenthi! Come with me to my father;—he will receive you kindly; for you have given me back my foot.”
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