arrived in the full number required by the law, and testified with cheerful mendacity in their companion’s favour.  The Basha listened with attention while the litigants swore strange oaths and abused each other very thoroughly.  Then he silenced both parties with a word, and gave judgment for the defendant.  There was no appeal, though, had the defendant been an unprotected subject, the plaintiff’s knife had assuredly entered into the final settlement of this little matter.  But the plaintiff knew that an attack upon a French protege would lead to his own indefinite imprisonment and occasional torture, to the confiscation of his goods, and to sundry other penalties that may be left unrecorded, as they would not look well in cold print.  He knew, moreover, that everything is predestined, that no man may avoid Allah’s decree.  These matters of faith are real, not pale abstractions, in Morocco.  So he was less discontented with the decision than one of his European brethren would have been in similar case—­and far more philosophic regarding it.

[Illustration:  EVENING, MAZAGAN]

Quite slowly we completed our outfit for the inland journey.  Heaven aid the misguided Nazarene who seeks to accomplish such matters swiftly in this land of eternal afternoon.  I bought an extraordinary assortment of what our American friends call “dry-goods” in the Jewish stores, from the very business-like gentlemen in charge of them.  These all wore black gaberdines, black slippers, stockings that were once white, and black skull-caps over suspiciously shining love-locks.  Most of the Jewish men seemed to have had smallpox; in their speech they relied upon a very base Arabic, together with worse Spanish or quite barbarous French.  Djedida having no Mellah, as the Moorish ghetto is called, they were free to trade all over the town, and for rather less than a pound sterling I bought quite an imposing collection of cutlery, plate, and dishes for use on the road.  It is true, as I discovered subsequently, that the spoons and forks might be crushed out of shape with one hand, that the knives would cut nothing rougher than Danish butter, and were imported from Germany with a Sheffield mark on them to deceive the natives, and that the plates and dishes were not too good to go with the cutlery.  But nothing had been bought without bargaining of a more or less exciting and interesting sort, and for the bargaining no extra charge whatever was made.  The little boxlike shops, with flaps that served as shutters, were ill-adapted for private purchase; there was no room for more than the owner inside, and before we had been at one for five minutes the roadway became impassable.  All the idlers and beggars in that district gathered to watch the strangers, and the Maalem was the only one who could keep them at bay.  Salam would merely threaten to cuff an importunate rogue who pestered us, but the Maalem would curse him so fluently and comprehensively, and extend the anathema so far in either direction,