Much had they got to say about the price of barley and the drought; of tribal fights; of where our Lord the Sultan was, and if he had reduced the rebels in the hills,—matters that constitute the small talk of the tents, just as the weather and the fashionable divorce figure in drawing-rooms. Knowing what was expected of him, the Consul touched on European politics, upon inventions, the progress that the French had made upon the southern frontier of Algeria; and as he thus unpacked his news with due prolixity, the Sherif now and again interjected one or another of those pious phrases, such as “Allah is merciful,” or “God’s ways are wonderful,” which at the same time show the interjector’s piety, and give the man who is discoursing time to collect himself, and to prepare another phrase. After a little conversation languished, and the two men who knew each other well sat listlessly, the Consul smoking and the Sherif passing the beads of a cheap wooden rosary between the fingers of his right hand, whilst with his left he waved a cotton pocket handkerchief to keep away the flies. Looking up at his companion, “Consul,” he said, for he had now dropped the Ambassador with which he first had greeted him, “you know us well, you speak our tongue; even you know Shillah, the language of the accursed Berbers, and have translated Sidi Hammo into the speech of Nazarenes-I beg your pardon—of the Rumi,” for he had seen a flush rise on the Consul’s cheek. “You like our country, and have lived in it for more than twenty years. I do not speak to you about our law, for every man cleaves to his own, but of our daily life. Tell me now, which of the two makes a man happier, the law of Sidna Aissa, or that of our Prophet, God’s own Messenger?” He stopped and waited courteously, playing with his naked toes, just as a European plays with his fingers in the intervals of speech. The Consul sent a veritable solfatara of tobacco smoke out of his mouth and nostrils, and laying down his cigarette returned no answer for a little while. Perchance his thoughts were wandering towards the cities brilliant with light—the homes of science and of art. Cities of vain endeavour in which men pass their lives thinking of the condition of their poorer brethren, but never making any move to get down off their backs. He thought of London and of Paris and New York, the dwelling-places both of law and order, and the abodes of noise. He pondered on their material advancement: their tubes that burrow underneath the ground, in which run railways carrying their thousands all the day and far into the night; upon their hospitals, their charitable institutions, their legislative assemblies, and their museums, with their picture-galleries, their theatres—on the vast sums bestowed to forward arts and sciences, and on the poor who shiver in their streets and cower under railway arches in the dark winter nights.