For the amusement of the people who did not care for acrobatic feats and stood in no need of the primitive methods of the physician, there was a story-teller, who addressed a somewhat attenuated circle of phlegmatic listeners, and a snake-charmer who was surrounded by children.  Sidi ben Aissa undoubtedly kept the snakes—­spotted leffas from the Sus—­from hurting his follower, but not even the saint could draw floos from poor youngsters whose total wealth would probably have failed to yield threepence to the strictest investigator.  Happily for them the charmer was an artist in his way; he loved his work for its own sake, and abated no part of his performance, although the reward would hardly buy him and his assistant a meal of mutton and bread at their labour’s end.  The boys of Hanchen were doing brisk business in the brass cases of cartridges that had been fired on the previous day, and without a doubt the story of the wonders of a repeating gun lost nothing in the telling.

[Illustration:  THE SNAKE-CHARMER]

There was no interval for rest when the hours of greatest heat came round.  Late arrivals who travelled in on mule- or donkey-back renewed business when it slackened, and brought fresh goods to be sold or exchanged.  The “Sons of Lions” had broken up the market at Sidi el Muktar on the previous Friday before it was properly concluded, and many natives, disappointed there, had come out to Hanchen to do their business, until there seemed to be nothing in any stall that lacked buyers.  Even the old man who had a heap of scrap-iron when the market opened had sold every piece of it by four o’clock, though it would have puzzled a European to find any use for such rubbish.  The itinerant mender of slippers was hard at work with three young lads, and I never saw any one of the party idle.  Hawks and corbies fluttered over the butcher’s ground, and I noticed a vulture in the deep vault of the sky.  Pariah dogs would clear every bit of refuse from the ground before another day dawned, and in their nasty fashion would serve their country, for the weather was very hot and the odours were overpowering.  Flies covered all unprotected meat until it ceased to look red, and the stall of the seller of sweetmeats was a study in black and white:  black when the swarms settled, and white for a brief moment when he switched them off with his feathery bamboo brush.  Yet, in spite of the many difficulties under which trade was carried on, one could not help feeling that buyers and sellers alike were enjoying themselves hugely.  The market did more than help them to make a living.  It was at once their club, their newspaper, and their theatre, and supplied the one recreation of lives that—­perhaps only to European seeming—­were tedious as a twice-told tale.