The nearest I got was a picture of an old man in a turban coming out of a bottle in a cloud of smoke, which I remembered from a child's edition of the _Arabian Nights_.

But if he was dim, the lady was dimmer.

Sometimes I thought of her as a fat old German crone, sometimes as a harsh-featured woman like a schoolmistress with thin lips and eyeglasses.

But I had to fit the East into the picture, so I made her young and gave her a touch of the languid houri in a veil.

I was always wanting to pump Blenkiron on the subject, but he shut up like a rat-trap.