Wilson, it developed, was a former member of the A. E. F. Instead of returning to America with his regiment after the Armistice, he had married a French girl and settled in Algiers as a motor mechanic and chauffeur. He drove us for upward of six thousand kilometers over desert roads, mountain roads, and across regions where there were no roads worthy of the name whatsoever. He had a profound knowledge of the idiosyncrasies of a motor; under the most trying conditions he never lost his patience or his temper; and his unfailing good humor won him the friendship of Europeans, Arabs, Berbers, and Moors alike. When we parted, months later, on the frontier of Morocco, I told him that it would give me genuine pleasure to recommend him to any one who contemplated motoring in North Africa, and I am now keeping that promise. Mrs. Powell and I had been in Africa so many times that for us the drive through the brilliantly lighted streets to the hotel held little novelty. Our chief concern was whether we should find awaiting us a room with bath, for the hotels of Tunis are limited in number—the good hotels, I mean—and during the tourist season they are always overcrowded, so that it is the part of prudence to reserve one’s accommodations well in advance. But my daughter Bettie was fascinated by the unfamiliar street scenes: the ceaseless stream of men wearing every form of head-covering—hats, helmets, hoods, tarbooshes, turbans; the stately Arabs, the elders looking for all the world like Old-Testament patriarchs; the bare-legged Berber porters in ragged garments of coarse brown camel’s-hair, sacks drawn over their heads to be used as sun-shades or overcoats according to the weather; the gaudily uniformed soldiers of the Beylical Guard, who might have stepped straight from a comic-opera chorus; the veiled women slipping silently along like sheeted ghosts; the groups of natives squatted about their cooking-pots, from which strange smells assailed the nostrils; the files of swaying, supercilious camels laden with the products of the South; the droves of patient little asses trotting demurely along beneath enormous burdens; the high whitewashed walls of the houses, broken by mysterious latticed windows, from which the eyes of unseen, jealously guarded women were peering down, no doubt; the fleeting glimpses caught through doors ajar of Oriental courtyards filled with color—to her this was one of the Thousand and One Nights. Ah, me ... what wouldn’t I give to again be seeing Africa for the first time through the eyes of youth!