of wearing clothes!  Each temple has a band of eight or ten of these girls, who celebrate their saltatory rites morning and evening.  Advancing at the head of the religious procession, they move themselves in an easy and graceful manner, with gradual transition to a more sensuous and voluptuous motion, suiting their action to the religious frame of mind of the devout until their well-rounded limbs and lithe figures express a degree of piety consonant with the purpose of the particular occasion.  They attend all public ceremonies and festivals, executing their audacious dances impartially for gods and men.

The Nautch girls are purchased in infancy, and as carefully trained in their wordly way as the Devo Dasi for the diviner function, being about equally depraved.  All the large cities contain full sets of these girls, with attendant musicians, ready for hire at festivals of any kind, and by leaving orders parties are served at their residences with fidelity and dispatch.  Commonly they dance two at a time, but frequently some wealthy gentleman will secure the services of a hundred or more to assist him through the day without resorting to questionable expedients of time-killing.  Their dances require strict attention, from the circumstance that their feet—­like those of the immortal equestrienne of Banbury Cross—­are hung with small bells, which must be made to sound in concert with the notes of the musicians.  In attitude and gesture they are almost as bad as their pious sisters of the temples.  The endeavor is to express the passions of love, hope, jealousy, despair, etc, and they eke out this mimicry with chanted songs in every way worthy of the movements of which they are the explanatory notes.  These are the only women in Hindustan whom it is thought worth while to teach to read and write.  If they would but make as noble use of their intellectual as they do of their physical education, they might perhaps produce books as moral as The Dance of Death.

In Persia and Asia Minor, the dances and dancers are nearly alike.  In both countries the Georgian and Circassian slaves who have been taught the art of pleasing, are bought by the wealthy for their amusement and that of their wives and concubines.  Some of the performances are pure in motive and modest in execution, but most of them are interesting otherwise.  The beautiful young Circassian slave, clad in loose robes of diaphanous texture, takes position, castanets in hand, on a square rug, and to the music of a kind of violin goes through the figures of her dance, her whiteness giving her an added indelicacy which the European spectator misses in the capering of her berry brown sisters in sin of other climes.