for how many minutes they did not know, but for what seemed to them a long while.  Their reverie stopped when the music ceased.  It was then that a dun-coloured dove with a lilac neck flew through the garden and took refuge in a palm, seen for a moment as she alighted on the flexible djerrid on a background of blue air.  She disappeared into the heart of the tree; the leaves were again stirred.  She cooed once or twice, and then there was a hush and a stillness in every leaf.

“You would like to see my property?”

Owen said he would like to see all the oasis, or as much as they could see of it in one day without fatiguing themselves.

“You can see it all in a day, for it is but a small island, about a thousand Arabs in the villages.”

“So many as that?”

“Well, there has to be, in order to save ourselves from the predatory bands which still exist, for, as I daresay you have already learned, the Arabs are divided into two classes—­the agricultural and the nomadic.  We have to be in sufficient numbers to save ourselves from the nomads, otherwise we should be pillaged and harried from year’s end to year’s end—­all our crops and camels taken.”

“Border warfare—­the same as existed in England in the Middle Ages.”

Beclere agreed that the unsettled vagrant civilisation which existed in the North of Africa up to 1830—­which in 1860 was beginning to pass away, and the traces of which still survived in the nineties—­ resembled very much the border forays for which Northumberland is still famous; and, walking through the palm-groves towards the Arab village, they talked of the Arab race, listening all the while to the singing of doves and of streams, Owen listless and happy.

“But I shall remember her again presently, and the stab will be as bitter as ever!”

Beclere did not believe that the Arab race was ever as great a race as we were inclined to give it credit for being.

“All the same, if it hadn’t been for your ancestors, we might have all been Moslems now,” Owen said, stopping to admire what remained of the race which had conquered Spain and nearly conquered France.  “Now they are outcasts of our civilisation—­but what noble outcasts!  That fellow, he is old, and without a corner, perhaps, where to lay his head, but he walks magnificently in his ragged bournous.  He is poor, but he isn’t a beggar; his life is sordid, but it isn’t trivial; he retains his grand walk and his solemn salute; and if he has never created an art, himself is proof that he isn’t without the artistic sentiment.”

Beclere looked at Owen in surprise, and Owen, thinking to astonish him, added: 

“His poverty and his filth are sublime; he is a Jew from Amsterdam painted by Rembrandt, or a Jew from Palestine described by the authors of the Pentateuch.”

“The Jew is a tougher fellow to deal with; he cannot be eradicated, but the Arab was very nearly passing away.  If he had insisted on remaining the noble outcast which you admire, he would not have survived the Red Indian many hundreds of years.  I don’t contest whether to lose him would be a profit or a loss, but when civilisation comes the native race must accept it or extinction.”