The varieties of nationality, costume and color are striking in the extreme. Here are seen men and women, white, brown, yellow, black and shades and combinations of two or all. Here are youthful forms, graceful and like living bits of ebony or bronze; antiques weatherworn and wind-dried, who when asleep upon the sidewalk, which is quite the custom, look like recently disentombed mummies; old and wrinkled women with hair dyed a brilliant red; Italian soldiers in the national green uniform; native or colonial troops in khaki; some native regiments and police in vivid blue or brown with red fez topped with a huge yellow tassel; beggars and children with little more than a breech cloth; women with faces covered and breasts and limbs uncovered; women wrapped as ghosts, with just the feet showing and one eye peeping and twinkling, encircled about the middle with many folds of cloth; the medicine or dance man in his costume of rags, crane heads and feathers, with a girdle of jangling tin and bones, his little drum with curved sticks, his dance and music the convulsions and noises of a stupid beggar; and many, very many, blind;--who seem to have no home but the sidewalk, where you see them asleep at any time, day or night, waiting in darkness for alms and the judgment day. A certain sect shave the head and grow a crown lock, Chinaman style, except it is unplatted. The blessed dead must not be denied by the hands of the living, so the lock is left to handle the corpse. The chief business is fighting. The chief export, a desert grass used in the manufacture of a fine paper. Business is stagnant, as the war between the Italians and the Arabs shifted barter by caravan with the interior to the British colony on the east and the French on the west. Each trade or business is segregated or localized. The jewelers, an apparently thrifty lot and mostly Turkish Jews, are bunched on a street near one of the hotels. The meat market is quite interesting if you can stand the smell. The natives eat the whole carcass. The milkman, morning and evening, calls at the door of his customer with his goods in the original package. The goats are more docile and better behaved than the children. They stand and deliver the quantity demanded. There is neither chance for nor great economy in adulteration--water is too scarce. It is brought to the city mule-back in porous jars. You can have your milk from the black, white or brown nanny as desired. A goat is a respected member of the family and his odor by comparison not offensive. Never after four months in Tripolitania did John laugh at the Englishman who carried his tub with him. He is an experienced traveler and knows what he is about. A cold bath cost John $1.50. The Bedouins and Tuaregs are proud, aristocratic, heroic-looking people; but they bathe in the sand much as a mother hen dusts herself in a neighbor's flower bed.