race, or are looked at by them in public.  Here are five thousand Jews in blue gabardines, sashes about their waists, slippers upon their feet, little skullcaps upon the backs of their heads, hair combed down on the forehead, and cut straight across the middle of it from side to side—­the selfsame fashion their Tangier ancestors have worn for I don’t know how many bewildering centuries.  Their feet and ankles are bare.  Their noses are all hooked, and hooked alike.  They all resemble each other so much that one could almost believe they were of one family.  Their women are plump and pretty, and do smile upon a Christian in a way which is in the last degree comforting.

What a funny old town it is!  It seems like profanation to laugh and jest and bandy the frivolous chat of our day amid its hoary relics.  Only the stately phraseology and the measured speech of the sons of the Prophet are suited to a venerable antiquity like this.  Here is a crumbling wall that was old when Columbus discovered America; was old when Peter the Hermit roused the knightly men of the Middle Ages to arm for the first Crusade; was old when Charlemagne and his paladins beleaguered enchanted castles and battled with giants and genii in the fabled days of the olden time; was old when Christ and his disciples walked the earth; stood where it stands today when the lips of Memnon were vocal and men bought and sold in the streets of ancient Thebes!

The Phoenicians, the Carthagenians, the English, Moors, Romans, all have battled for Tangier—­all have won it and lost it.  Here is a ragged, oriental-looking Negro from some desert place in interior Africa, filling his goatskin with water from a stained and battered fountain built by the Romans twelve hundred years ago.  Yonder is a ruined arch of a bridge built by Julius Caesar nineteen hundred years ago.  Men who had seen the infant Saviour in the Virgin’s arms have stood upon it, maybe.

Near it are the ruins of a dockyard where Caesar repaired his ships and loaded them with grain when he invaded Britain, fifty years before the Christian era.

Here, under the quiet stars, these old streets seem thronged with the phantoms of forgotten ages.  My eyes are resting upon a spot where stood a monument which was seen and described by Roman historians less than two thousand years ago, whereon was inscribed: 

               “Weare the CANAANITES.  We are they that
               have been driven out of the land of Canaan
               by the Jewish robber, Joshua.”

Joshua drove them out, and they came here.  Not many leagues from here is a tribe of Jews whose ancestors fled thither after an unsuccessful revolt against King David, and these their descendants are still under a ban and keep to themselves.