The first was an ill-dressed fellow, young, and with very sad eyes such as men keep sometimes in early life but lose at last as they learn in time to prey upon others. He had been unfortunate. We went along together across a plain peculiarly lonely, and towards a large, bare, isolated rock as high as a Welsh mountain and, as it seemed, quite uninhabited. We were already in sight of the main range of Atlas, and in the far ravines was a darkness that might, perhaps, be made by cedar-trees, but all around us was nothing but bare land and now and then a glint from salt marshes far away. [Sidenote: Story of the Lions] I asked him from what part of France he had come. He answered that he was born in the colony. Then I asked him whether the colonists thought themselves prosperous or no. He said, as do all sad people, that luck was the difference. Those whom fortune loved, prospered; those whom she hated, failed. He was right; but when he came to examples he was startling. He showed me, high upon the rock before us, which I had thought quite lonely, a considerable building, made of the stones of the place and in colour similar to the mountain itself. “Beyond this hill,” he said, “is Batna, and beyond Batna is Lambèse. Since you are walking to Timgad you will pass both these places, and everywhere you will hear of the House of the Lions. Then you will learn, if ever you needed proof, that it is luck which governs all our efforts in this colony.” I looked curiously at the great house, and asked him to tell me the story. This he did; and I write here, as exactly as I can from memory, the story he told. “In that very place upon the hillside where now stands so huge a house stood, when we were yet children, a little hut of stone such as the settlers build, with two rooms in it only, a bed, three chairs, a table, and a cooking-pot. And to this poverty nothing was added, for ill-luck pursued that roof. “There lived under it a man and his wife who had two children. They had come here to rise with the country (as it is said), but, instead of so rising, first one evil and then another fell upon them till their little horde was eaten up and the field also, and the man had to work for others—a most miserable fate. He got work in the building of the prison of Lambèse, but, as he was not created by God to be a merchant or a mortar-mixer, nor even a carrier of stone, he earned very little and was always in dread of being sent away; and his companions jeered at him, for the unfortunate are ridiculous not only among the rich, but in every rank; and not only the rich jeer at poverty and shun it, but the poor also—indeed, all men.