3rd.  Any thing new or remarkable in the house, or household furniture, must be noticed or admired.

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!  Madame Bousac accompanied the merchants to Morocco, to pay her respects to the Emperor.  Among other modest or confidential demands which the lady made on the Imperial benevolence, was that of an advance to her husband of ten thousand dollars.  His Imperial Highness was immediately obliged to give a formal assent before his court.

She then visited the Harem, and felt herself quite at home.  All the ladies, wives or concubines of the Emperor, waited upon her; and served her with tea and bread, and butter.

The presentation of bread and butter and cups of tea, is said to be the highest honour conferred on visitors, but why or wherefore I have not heard.

Madame Bousac gave us some account of the Morocco harem, which we may suppose is like that of Fez and Miknas.  The number of these ladies was some two hundred.  They are all attired alike, except the four wives, who dress a little more in the style of Sultanas.  I am sorry to be obliged to disabuse the reader of the romance and oriental colouring attached to our ideas of the harem, by giving Madame Bousac’s simile of those angelic houries.  This lady said, “they are like a string of charity-school girls going to church on a Sunday morning.”

Their penurious lord keeps down their pin-money to the lowest point, and is not more liberal to his ladies than to his other subjects.  Former sultans were accustomed to allow their ladies half a dollar a day, but these have but twopence, or at least fourpence.  Muley Abd Errahman even traffics in his beauties, and will now and then make a present of one to a governor, in consideration of receiving an adequate return of money, or presents.  Sometimes, the Moors pay their Shereefian Sultan a similar compliment, by presenting him with slaves from their harem. [38]