| SWORD DANCE BEFORE A PACHA.
ENAMORED of this beautiful dancer-armed, but not forbidding—M. Gerome
has not hesitated to transfer her from the smoky, ill-lit cafe, in
which we last saw her, to this sumptuous mansion, and to triple
in numbers both her orchestra and her audience. Certainly her professional rise in life is well deserved ; and she balances and sways
before these grave and reverend signors as sumptuously as before the
idlers and small tradesmen who frequented her former stage in
the "Sword Dance in the Cafe."
Both painters and travellers have long united in celebrating these
public dancing girls of Egypt, and their history is not without interest.
The most famous of them are of a distinct tribe called Ghawazee ; a
female of the tribe is a Ghazeeyeh, and a man a Ghazee, but the
plural, Ghawazee, is generally understood as applying to the women.
Most travellers err in confounding the common dancing-girls with the
Al'mehs, who are female singers. The Ghawazee perform unveiled
in the public streets, even to amuse the rabble, and to European eyes
their dancing has often but little elegance. They commence slowly,
with a degree of decorum, "but soon, by more animated looks, by a
more rapid collision of their castanets of brass, and by an increased
energy in every motion, they exhibit a spectacle exactly agreeing with
the descriptions which Martial and Juvenal have given of the perform-
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