Reclining on a grassy bank before the pavilion was an Arab in a plum-colored burnous, a scarlet hibiscus-blossom thrust behind his ear, pensively engaged in the extraction of mournful music from a flute. We did not need to be told that this was the Larbi described by Hichens. He is a born actor and, if the stories one hears are to be believed, he has been highly successful in capitalizing the fame brought him by the book, for every English and American visitor to the gardens asks to see him and for the plaintive love-airs which he draws from his little reed rewards him generously. In a charming glade beside a vine-clad kiosk we found another Arab, who offered, for a small consideration, to tell our fortunes in the sand. Ordinarily I should have passed him by, but the atmosphere of the Jardin Landon encourages such tomfoolery, and, at my daughter’s insistence, I told him to try his hand at prophecy. Drawing the hood of his burnous over his head, he spread white sand evenly upon the ground, traced cabalistic designs in it with a pointed stick, blew upon it, and, after a few moments spent in scrutinizing the result, informed me that I was about to undertake a long journey—a safe prophecy under the circumstances and, as it happened, a correct one. He did not prove such a good guesser in my daughter’s case, however, for, after the customary shibboleth, he announced that she was being pursued by a tall dark man who came from out of the South. This had the effect of shaking our confidence in the infallibility of the sand-diviner, for the youth who had pursued her across half North Africa in his big Minerva was a Belgian nobleman, short, fair-haired, and blond! The gardens of the Villa Landon are intensely theatrical and one always has the feeling that he has inadvertently wandered upon a stage set for a play, which, to my way of thinking, adds enormously to their charm. They evidently did not make the same appeal to all my country-people that they did to me, however, for, while seated beneath a pergola, I heard a voice, with the unmistakable accent of the Middle West, coming from beyond the screen of shrubbery. “This ain’t half bad,” the unseen speaker remarked condescendingly, “but saay, you just oughta see our back yard in Topeka when the sunflowers and the hollyhocks are out.” [Illustration: DESERT DAMSELS, OLD AND YOUNG In the mountains of southernmost Algeria dwell the Ouled-Naïl, a tribe which supplies the dancing-girls for half North Africa. When in their early teens they are charming, with soft brown skins and sparkling eyes, but the life soon coarsens and hardens them, and by the time they have reached their twenties the merry eyes are cold and calculating and the smiling lips are tight and grim]