222 A Specimen Day 
tall and tlancis, their partners are usually short 
and stout, and, 
“ Her stature tall, I hate a dumpy woman,” 
is a matter of taste upon which most of us agree 
with his lordship. This peculiar breadth of face 
and person probably result from hard work and 
good fare, developing adipose tissue. I could 
not bring myself to admire Gondebiza, the prin¬ 
cess royal,—what is grotesque in one sex becomes 
unsightly in the other. Fat, thirty, and perhaps 
once fair, her charms had seen their prime, and 
the system of circles and circlets which com¬ 
posed her personnel had assumed a tremulous and 
gravitating tendency. She was habited in the 
height of Fa/z fashion. Her body was modestly 
invested in a thin pattern of tattoo, and a gauze- 
work of oil and camwood; the rest of the toilette 
was a dwarf pigeon-tail of fan-palm, like that of 
the men, and a manner of apron, white beads, and 
tree bark, greasy and reddened : the latter was 
tucked under and over the five lines of cowries, 
which acted as cestus to the portly middle, “ big as 
a budget.” The horns of hair, not unlike the rays 
of light in Michael Angelo’s “Moses,” were covered 
with a cap of leaves, and they were balanced behind 
by a pigtail lashed with brass wire. Her ornaments 
were sundry necklaces of various beads, large red 
and white, and small blue and pink porcelains; a 
