Before taking our departure from Tlemcen, courtesy and etiquette required me to pay a call on the military governor. I found his residence with some little difficulty—a modest, red brick villa with a Senegalese _tirailleur_ pacing up and down before the gate. My ring was answered by a soldier servant, and I was shown into a comfortable reception-hall, from whose walls hung, to my astonishment, an enormous Harvard banner and the Stars and Stripes. As I was staring at them curiously, wondering how these familiar emblems happened to be so prominently displayed in the quarters of a French officer in this remote Algerian town, the commandant himself entered the room—a trim, alert, slenderly built man, the breast of his sky-blue uniform ablaze with ribbons and in his hand a copy of the “Literary Digest”! Then I recognized him as Colonel Paul Azan, the distinguished French officer, wounded at Verdun, who during the closing years of the World War served as instructor in military science at Harvard. He pressed me into a great leather chair, offered me an excellent cigar, and proceeded to bombard me with questions, phrased in Back-Bay English, as to conditions and happenings in the United States. Here we were, gossiping like two friends of long standing of things four thousand miles away, our conversation constantly interspersed with allusions to Commonwealth Avenue, Copley Plaza, or College Yard, while the bayonet of the Senegalese sentry’s rifle constantly passed and repassed the window, and, beyond the olive-groves and almond-orchards of Mansoura, the distant Moroccan mountains rose in purple majesty against the African sky. Azan, it developed, was at the moment occupied with the equipment and despatch of troops to reinforce the French armies mobilized along the borders of the Riff, where, if the reports of the French Intelligence Service were to be believed, the _harkas_ of Abd-el-Krim were preparing for war. In fact, a column was leaving for the west by road that very day. It was composed, so Azan informed me, of complements of _tirailleurs_, spahis, _chasseurs d’Afrique_, _infanterie coloniale_, and a battalion of the Foreign Legion. “Are there any Americans in the _régiment étranger_ at present?” I inquired. “Just now,” replied the commandant, “we have only one of your countrymen. But his is a most interesting case. Let me tell you about him. He comes from somewhere in your Middle West, and I gather that his parents are absurdly rich. In any event, they spoiled him by giving him far more money than was good for him. Shortly after graduation—he attended one of the big Eastern universities—he married a girl of excellent family and they went to Paris on their wedding trip.