walls, and a stork on one leg in the foreground.  It cost me some effort to tear myself away from the place, and as I remounted and prepared to ride off the veteran cried once more, “I have seen many Sultans.”  Then the stork left his perch on the zowia’s walls, and settled by the marsh, clapping his mandibles as though to confirm the old man’s statement, and the little boys took up the cry, not knowing what they said.  He had seen many Sultans.  The Praise to Allah, so had not I.

[Illustration:  ON GUARD]

By another douar, this time on the outskirts of the R’hamna country, we paused for a mid-day rest, and entered the village in search of milk and eggs.  All the men save one were at work on the land, and he, the guardian of the village, an old fellow and feeble, stood on a sandy mound within the zariba.  He carried a very antiquated flint-lock, that may have been own brother to Kaid M’Barak’s trusted weapon.  I am sure he could not have had the strength to fire, even had he enjoyed the knowledge and possessed the material to load it.  It was his business to mount guard over the village treasure.  The mound he stood upon was at once the mat’mora that hid the corn store, and the bank that sheltered the silver dollars for whose protection every man of the village would have risked his life cheerfully.  The veteran took no notice of our arrival:  had we been thieves he could have offered no resistance.  He remained silent and stationary, unconscious that the years in which he might have fulfilled his trust had gone for ever.  All along the way the boundaries of arable land were marked by little piles of stones and I looked anxiously for some sign of the curious festival that greets the coming of the new corn, a ceremony in which a figure is made for worship by day and sacrifice by night; we were just too late for it.  For the origin of this sacrifice the inquirer must go back to the time of nature worship.  It was an old practice, of course, in the heyday of Grecian civilisation, and might have been seen in England, I believe, little more than twenty years ago.

Claims for protection are made very frequently upon the road.  There are few of the dramatic moments in which a man rushes up, seizes your stirrup and puts himself “beneath the hem of your garment,” but there are numerous claims for protection of another sort.  In Morocco all the Powers that signed the Treaty of Madrid are empowered to grant the privilege.  France has protected subjects by the thousand.  They pay no taxes, they are not to be punished by the native authorities until their Vice-Consul has been cited to appear in their defence, and, in short, they are put above the law of their own country and enabled to amass considerable wealth.  The fact that the foreigner who protects them is often a knave and a thief is a draw-back, but the popularity of protection is immense, for the protector may possibly not combine cunning with his greed, while the native