From earliest childhood they are trained for a life of immorality very much as a promising colt is trained for the race-course. A girl is scarcely out of her cradle before, under the tutelage of her mother, who has herself been a _danseuse_ in her time, she begins the arduous course of gymnastics and muscle training which is the foundation of their suggestive _danses du ventre_. Morning, noon, and night, day after day, year after year, the muscles of her chest, her back, her hips, her thighs, her abdomen are developed and suppled and trained until they will respond to her wishes as readily as her slender, henna-stained fingers. Her lustrous blue-black hair is brushed and combed and oiled and brushed again; she is taught to play the hautboy, the zither, and the flute and to sing the haunting love-songs of the desert people; to make the thick black native coffee and with inimitable dexterity to roll a cigarette. By the time she has entered her teens she is ready to make her début in the dance-hall of some Algerian town, a mistress of all the peculiar arts and accomplishments which make the successful courtezan. After half a dozen years or so of a life which knows no moral scruples, during which she carefully hoards the money bestowed on her by her admirers, she returns, a-clank with gold pieces and jewelry, to the mud-walled mountain village from which she came, to marry some well-to-do man of the tribe and to bear him children, who, if they are boys, will perhaps don the scarlet burnous and white turban of the spahis and serve in the armies of France, or, if they are girls, will live the life of their mother all over again. The profession is, in fact, a hereditary one, which a very large proportion of the women of the tribe pursue without the slightest blemish to their reputations. It is an extraordinary custom, and one to which no other country, so far as I am aware, offers a parallel, for whereas the geishas of Japan, the nautches of India, and the _ghawazi_ of Egypt are but classes, the Ouled-Naïl are a race, as distinct in features and characteristics as the Touareg, the Kabyles, or the Riffi.[3] European writers have been prone to envelop these demi-mondaines of the desert in a rosy veil of romance, which is, however, not wholly justified by the facts. Many of them, as I have just said, after earning their dowries in the dance-halls, return to their people in the mountains, marry a respectable young man of the tribe, and ever after lead strictly moral lives; but others, judging from their appearances, have been in no great hurry to reform and settle down.