"Believe me, sir, she won't do for you."
"What! thou man-headed dog! Dost fancy thou hast to do with beggars who cannot give thee what thou askest? I come hither to buy for Hassan Pasha, the Governor of Buda, who is wont to give two thousand ducats to him who asks him for one thousand."
At these words the damsel's face was illuminated by an unwonted smile, and at that moment her large, fiery eyes flashed so at Yffim Beg that his eyes could not have been more blinded if he had been walking on the seashore and two suns had flashed simultaneously in his face, one from the sky and the other from the watery mirror.
"It is not that," said the slave merchant, bowing himself to the ground; "on the contrary, I'll let you have the damsel so cheaply that you will see from the very price that I had reserved her for one of the lowest mushirs, in case he should take a fancy to her—you shall have her for a hundred dinars."
"Thou blasphemer, thou! Dost thou cheapen in this fashion the masterpieces of Nature. Thou shouldst ask ten thousand dinars for her, or have a stroke on the soles of thy feet with a bamboo for every dinar thou askest below that price."
The merchant's face grew dark.
"Take her not, sir," said he; "you will be no friend to yourself or to your master if you would bring her into his harem."
"I suppose," said the Beg, "that the damsel has a rough voice, and that is why she is going so cheaply?" and he ordered her to sing a song to him if she knew one.
"Ask her not to do that, sir!" implored the chapman. But, already, he was too late. At the very first word the girl had laid hold of a mandolin, and striking the chords till they sounded like the breeze on an æolian harp, she began to sing in the softest, sweetest, most ardent voice an Arab love-song:
"In the rose-groves of Shiraz,
In the pale beams of moonlight,
In the burning heart's slumber,
Love ever is born.