"But Mrs. Hogg is not dead too?" said I; "where is she, and Mrs. Figsby?"
"La! sir; you're the Persian prince, I declare," said the old woman, "of whom we all talk so much about." Upon which, she immediately undertook to give me a history of the family since I had left England. The father Hogg, it seems, had died not many months ago of apoplexy; his widow was living in a neighbouring street, in a small house, with her eldest daughter, who was still unmarried. Mrs. Figsby (alas! my own Bessy!) occupied a handsome house nearly opposite to the one at the door of which I now stood, and which the old woman pointed out to me; the youngest daughter had married, and lived in the country.
Leaving the old woman, I immediately crossed the street, and knocked at the Figsby gate, not without a certain palpitation of the heart. It was opened by a brilliantly-dressed servant in a gaudy kalaat, with a thick paste of white dust upon his head, and a bunch of ropes as thick as tent-ropes at his shoulder. Two others stood in the hall.
"Is Mrs. Figsby at home, by the blessing of the Prophet?" said I.
He said "Yes," with hesitation, eyeing me well from head to foot; and, delivering me over to the keeping of another man without a kalaat, I was walked up stairs. When we came to the head of the stairs, he stopped, and asked,
"Who shall I say?"
"Mirza Hajji Baba," I answered, recollecting well the whole ceremonial.
Upon which he opened the door, and exclaimed aloud, as well as I could understand, "Mister Hatchababy,"—or some such name.
"Mister who?" exclaimed a female within, whom, when I entered, I immediately recognised to be my former love, the moonfaced Bessy. But, oh! now different from the lovely Bessy I had known her! Instead of that light cypress-waisted figure which had charmed me so much, she was now grown into a woman fat enough to be a Turk's wife. Her cheeks were rounded into coarse cushions, behind which reposed her almost secluded eyes. The beautiful throat of former days was scolloped into graduated ridges; and those arms, which formerly were lovely by themselves, were now so bound over with broad belts of golden bracelets, that they looked like the well-fitted hoops of a wine-cask. The hair, which flowed in ringlets over her brow and down her cheeks, was now confined to two lumps of curls, which were placed in a dense cluster on either side of her forehead; and her whole person, which formerly gave her the appearance of a Peri, now exhibited a surface agreeable only to the silk-mercer and the milliner who were called upon to clothe it.