4th. You must carry with you in your memorandum-book, or at the tip of
your tongue, a good assortment of first-rate compliments of the season.
If these are spiced with a little scandal of your neighbours, or the
party you have just left, so much the better; they are more relished.
Now you are obliged to visit twenty or thirty families per diem; and you
are literally passing through doors, square-courts, and corridors,
crossing patios and quadrangles, walking up and down stairs, getting up
and sitting down from morning to night, during these three mortal days.
It will be seen then, that these Passover and Tabernacle visits are
tremendous affairs, and require Herculean strength to get through their
polite duties. They may be days of jovial festivity to Jews, but
certainly they are days of labour and annoyance to Gentiles.
But I must now give an account of one or two remarkable personages whom
we visited. The first was Madame Bousac, a Jewess of this country. Her
father was a grandee at Court in the days of former emperors, and the
greatest merchant of his time, and she represented as an aristocrat
among her people, a modern Esther, standing and pleading between the
Sultan and her nation. This lady is the only native woman in the
country, Mooress or Jewess, who has tact or courage enough to go and
speak to the Emperor, and state her request with an unfaltering voice
beneath the awful shadow of the Shereefian presence!
