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The sun was setting, and flung a mellowing glow over the great golden domes and minarets of the mosques, the bazaars glittering with trifles and precious with elements of Oriental luxury, the tortuous thoroughfares with their motley throng, the quiet streets with their latticed windows, and their atmosphere heavy with silence and mystery, the palaces whose cupolas and towers had watched over so many centuries of luxury and intrigue, pleasure and crime, the pavilions, groves, gardens, kiosks which swarmed with the luxuriance of tropical growth over the hills and valleys of a city so vast and so beautiful that it tired the brain and fatigued the senses.

At the dawn of day there arose a fresh breeze; the surface of the lake became ruffled; all the delicately fine veils and flags disappeared in the air; the swinging kiosks of cobwebs, the suspension bridges and balustrades, or whatever they are called, which were constructed from leaf to leaf, vanished into nothing; six elves brought me my sausage-stick, and at the same time asked if I had any wish they could fulfil; whereupon I begged them to tell me how soup could be made from a sausage-stick.

Here is the residence of His Majesty Prea Bat Samdach Prea Sisowath, King of Cambodia; here dwell the twelve score dancing-girls of the famous royal ballet and the hundreds of concubines and attendants comprising the royal harem; here are the stables of the royal elephants and the sacred zebus; here a congeries of palaces, pavilions, throne halls, dance halls, temples, shrines, kiosks, monuments, courtyards, and gardens the like of which is not to be found outside the covers of The Thousand and One Nights.

Immense windmills with revolving arms were to be seen on every side; houses of a thousand extraordinary shapes were dotted along the banks: some were like villas, others like pavilions, kiosks, cottages, chapels, theatres, their roofs red, their walls black, blue, pink, and gray, their doors and windows encircled with white borders like drifts of snow.

The book-selling kiosks send in reports of the sale of the various newspapers, etc., to eliminate the waste of over-production, a very important matter in a country faced simultaneously by a vigorous demand for printed matter and an extreme scarcity of paper. It would be interesting to have statistics to illustrate the character of the literature in demand. One thing can be said at once.

"Gloomy trellises, the verdurous roofs of which bore, like thousands of lustres, the gleaming grapes of the Promised Land; kiosks, where carved arabesques were entertwined with jasmines and climbing plants, the lianas of Asia; basins, into which the waters artificial they are here flowed from afar to leap and murmur in the marble jets of alleys lined with all the fruit trees of England, of Europe, and of the sunny Eastern climates; green leaves besprinkled with blossoming shrubs, and marble beds enclosing sheaves of flowers."

"You will see that I do not let myself be carried away by an illusion, and that, as I tell you, he is saved, really saved. You know that an illustrated paper has published his portrait?" "I do not read illustrated papers." "You could have seen them at the kiosks where they are displayed.

Upon it were seats, and here and there little kiosks, but they swept by too swiftly for him to see what might be therein. From this nearest and swiftest platform a series of others descended to the centre of the space.

As, of old, the Roman populace gathered in holiday, theatre mood to see the Christians tortured and slain, so had this great concourse gathered about the beautiful Miriam, and her handsome lover Isaac Wolferstein. One of the Kiosks, from which "Covenant" brands were worked, was opened, and the spring instrument was brought out.

A caricature of him in company with those of Colomban, Kerdanic, and Colonel Hastaing was to be seen in the newspaper kiosks. The Anti-Pyrotists proclaimed that he had received fifty thousand francs from the big Jewish financiers.