the flute, which ought to have supported the voice, was apparently dumb, although the artist puffed out his cheeks as if his life depended on it. Only after creeping quite close to the performers could I discern certain wailful breathings; this brave instrument, all splotched with variegated colours, gave forth a succession of anguished and asthmatic whispers, the very phantom of a song, like the wind sighing through the trees.

Take away from modern poetry what appeals to primitive man--the jingle and pathetic fallacy--and the residue, if any, would be better expressed in prose.

When a camel expires in the plain near some nomad's tents, they sometimes set a spring-trap for jackals near the carcase--they eat these beasts and sell their skin for a few francs; the traps are craftily concealed underground, with a little brushwood thrown over them to aid the decpetion. It is impossible to be aware of their existence. Bot woe betide the wanderer who steps on them! For the machine closes with the shock of an earthquake, a perfect volcano of dust and iron teeth leaping into the air. Its force is such that the jackal's leg is cut clean off, and he hops away on the remaining three. For this and other reasons, therefore, it is advisable not to approach too near a dead camel.

They led me to his house, which is one of the few two-storied buildingd of the town and lies in a squalid street of mud-dwellings. Villanously dirty walls surround a massive entrance-gate studded with nails and bands of iron, intervolved in artful designs. No bell, no knocker, no door-handle; only an impressive lock. At the sight of this doorway I paused--it was grim, claustral, almost menacing; there was an air of enchantment aboutthe mansion, as if once in a hundred years its forbidding portals might turn on their rusty hinges.

Four pipes, reverentially inhaled...it was almost too much, for a mere dilitantte.