She stretched out her ivory fingers, ringed about with black lace, toward the key of the cabinet, and picked up a doll whose feet were sunk in two wooden clogs, starched linen cascading from her waist like gleaming white paper, and on her head a bonnet like the wing of a white kite, from under which peeped two flushed cheeks and a crimson mouth — how I longed to have one like her! And how silence seized me with astonishment and struck me dumb when I understood her purpose, as she addressed me in English: she wished me to choose between this fair-haired Dutch toy and that dark Mexican one which the lady's ivory fingertips now displayed before me, showing off the charm of her striped skirt and her embroidered blouse with its puffed sleeves, a fine glittering chain sparkling at her throat, and knotted upon her head, like a crown, two coal-black braids and a jeweled comb — or whether I preferred to possess the one robed in the kimono with its leaping figures of serpents and sweet basil, she of the sleek hair and the flat nose, who seemed to be fanning, with her fan, the volcano breezes rising from the land of Japan.

The venerable lady turned to rouse me from my frozen stillness and cried: Well now, little one — wouldn't you like to take this one?

Had it been given me to answer her merely with a "yes," or at least to utter any word at all, it would have sufficed for me to win the toy I craved! But how could any sound escape me, strangled as it was in

the gathering of my breath — so that every time my would-be bene-factress held out a doll, I lifted my chin at it in refusal, or shrugged my shoulders in a gesture of indifference beyond all cure!

And the noblewoman labored to please me! She went on turning through the full and overflowing shelves until she came upon one she felt certain I would prefer. How not, when she was the owner of the gold-threaded cloak and the brocaded shirt, her gazelle eyes shaded by a silken kufiyya

and an agal of hair — and to her astonishment, this one's luck proved like the luck of those before her... How strange! Had some stu-pefaction come over this child? Or had a kind of idiocy taken hold of her? Or was it nothing but childish obstinacy, that she turned away from all these captivating dolls... which had consumed the lifetime of the one who had acquired and selected them, to compose of them a collection unique — nay, a compendium of the costumes of all the nations together!

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Renew your beauty every day

And to do away with freckles, dark patches, and the pimples of youth

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CRÈME STILLMAN

STILLMAN'S CREAM

It keeps your skin soft, purifies it, and whitens it

Sold in the nouveautés shops and pharmacies

Agents: Halim Hanna & Co. — Beirut