- end_line
- 8689
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:18.539Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 8614
- text
- precedence became confused, and was very hard to restore.
At intervals, some one of the wives was weeded out, to the no small
delight of the remainder; but to their equal vexation her place would
soon after be supplied by some beautiful stranger; who assuming the
denomination of the vacated Night of the Moon, thenceforth commenced
her monthly revolutions in the king’s infallible calendar.
In constant attendance, was a band of old men; woe-begone, thin of leg,
and puny of frame; whose grateful task it was, to tarry in the garden
of Donjalolo’s delights, without ever touching the roses. Along with
innumerable other duties, they were perpetually kept coming and going
upon ten thousand errands; for they had it in strict charge to obey the
slightest behests of the damsels; and with all imaginable expedition to
run, fly, swim, or dissolve into impalpable air, at the shortest
possible notice.
So laborious their avocations, that none could discharge them for more
than a twelvemonth, at the end of that period giving up the ghost out
of pure exhaustion of the locomotive apparatus. It was this constant
drain upon the stock of masculine old age in the glen, that so
bethinned its small population of gray-beards and hoary-heads. And any
old man hitherto exempted, who happened to receive a summons to repair
to the palace, and there wait the pleasure of the king: this
unfortunate, at once suspecting his doom, put his arbor in order; oiled
and suppled his joints; took a long farewell of his friends; selected
his burial-place; and going resigned to his fate, in due time expired
like the rest.
Had any one of them cast about for some alleviating circumstance, he
might possibly have derived some little consolation from the thought,
that though a slave to the whims of thirty princesses, he was
nevertheless one of their guardians, and as such, he might ingeniously
have concluded, their superior. But small consolation this. For the
damsels were as blithe as larks, more playful than kittens; never
looking sad and sentimental, projecting clandestine escapes. But
supplied with the thirtieth part of all that Aspasia could desire;
glorying in being the spouses of a king; nor in the remotest degree
anxious about eventual dowers; they were care-free, content, and
rejoicing, as the rays of the morning.
Poor old men, then; it would be hard to distill out of your fate, one
drop of the balm of consolation. For, commissioned to watch over those
who forever kept you on the trot, affording you no time to hunt up
peccadilloes; was not this circumstance an aggravation of hard times? a
sharpening and edge-giving to the steel in your souls?
But much yet remains unsaid.
To dwell no more upon the eternal wear-and-tear incident to these
attenuated old warders, they were intensely hated by the damsels.
Inasmuch, as it was archly opined, for what ulterior purposes they were
retained.
Nightly couching, on guard, round the seraglio, like fangless old
bronze dragons round a fountain enchanted, the old men ever and anon
cried out mightily, by reason of sore pinches and scratches received in
the dark: And tri-trebly-tri-triply girt about as he was, Donjalolo
himself started from his slumbers, raced round and round through his
ten thousand corridors; at last bursting all dizzy among his
twenty-nine queens, to see what under the seventh-heavens was the
matter. When, lo and behold! there lay the innocents all sound asleep;
the dragons moaning over their mysterious bruises.
Ah me! his harem, like all large families, was the delight and the
torment of the days and nights of Donjalolo.
And in one special matter was he either eminently miserable, or
otherwise: for all his multiplicity of wives, he had never an heir. Not
his, the proud paternal glance of the Grand Turk Solyman, looking round
upon a hundred sons, all bone of his bone, and squinting with his
squint.
- title
- Chunk 3