I cannot quite state why the tendency toward Orientalism—­Oriental dress—­all the manner of an Oriental monarch—­has taken full possession of me:  but so it is:  for surely I am hardly any longer a Western, ‘modern’ mind, but a primitive and Eastern one.  Certainly, that cravat in the frame has receded a million, million leagues, ten thousand forgotten aeons, from me!  Whether this is a result due to my own personality, of old acquainted with Eastern notions, or whether, perhaps, it is the natural accident to any mind wholly freed from trammels, I do not know.  But I seem to have gone right back to the very beginnings, and resemblance with man in his first, simple, gaudy conditions.  My hair, as I sit here writing, already hangs a black, oiled string down my back; my scented beard sweeps in two opening whisks to my ribs; I have on the izar, a pair of drawers of yomani cloth like cotton, but with yellow stripes; over this a soft shirt, or quamis, of white silk, reaching to my calves; over this a short vest of gold-embroidered crimson, the sudeyree; over this a khaftan of green-striped silk, reaching to the ankles, with wide, long sleeves divided at the wrist, and bound at the waist with a voluminous gaudy shawl of Cashmere for girdle; over this a warm wide-flowing torrent of white drapery, lined with ermine.  On my head is the skull-cap, covered by a high crimson cap with deep-blue tassel; and on my feet is a pair of thin yellow-morocco shoes, covered over with thick red-morocco babooshes.  My ankles—­my ten fingers—­my wrists—­are heavy with gold and silver ornaments; and in my ears, which, with considerable pain, I bored three days since, are two needle-splinters, to prepare the holes for rings.

* * * * *

O Liberty!  I am free....

* * * * *

While I was going to visit my old home in Harley Street that night, at the very moment when I turned from Oxford Street into Cavendish Square, this thought, fiercely hissed into my ears, was all of a sudden seething in me:  ’If now I should lift my eyes, and see a man walking yonder—­just yonder—­at the corner there—­turning from Harewood Place into Oxford Street—­what, my good God, should I do?—­I without even a knife to run and plunge into his heart?’

And I turned my eyes—­ogling, suspicious eyes of furtive horror—­reluctantly, lingeringly turned—­and I peered deeply with lowered brows across the murky winds at that same spot:  but no man was there.

Hideously frequent is this nonsense now become with me—­in streets of towns—­in deep nooks of the country:  the invincible assurance that, if I but turn the head, and glance there—­at a certain fixed spot—­I shall surely see—­I must see—­a man.  And glance I must, glance I must, though I perish:  and when I glance, though my hairs creep and stiffen like stirring amobse, yet in my eyes, I know, is monarch indignation against the intruder, and my neck stands stiff as sovereignty itself, and on my brow sits more than all the lordship of Persepolis and Iraz.