In Return For His Compliance, He Presented Mr. Park With Great Plenty Of Provisions, And Desired To See Him Again In The Morning.

Mr. Park accordingly attended, and found the king sitting on his bed.

His majesty told him he was sick, and wished to have a little blood taken from him, but Mr. Park had no sooner tied up his arm, and displayed the lancet, than his courage failed, and he begged him to postpone the operation. He then observed, that his women were very desirous to see him, and requested that he would favour them with a visit. An attendant was ordered to conduct him, and he had no sooner entered the court appropriated to the ladies, than the whole seraglio surrounded him, some begging for physic, some for amber, and all of them trying that great African specific, blood-letting. They were ten or twelve in number, most of them young and handsome, and wearing on their heads ornaments of gold and beads of amber. They rallied him on the whiteness of his skin and the prominency of his nose. They insisted that both were artificial, the first they said, was produced when he was an infant, by dipping him in milk, and they insisted that his nose had been pinched every day, till it had acquired its present unsightly and unnatural conformation. On his part, without disputing his own deformity, he paid them many compliments on African beauty. He praised the glossy jet of their skins, and the lovely depression of their noses; but they said, that flattery, or as they emphatically termed it, honey-mouth, was not esteemed in Bondou.

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