“But,” you ask, and with good reason, “are there then no such people as the Moors?” Whether the term Moor can properly be applied to any _race_ is open to grave question, for those Moroccans whom the word is used to designate are ethnically hybrids, with the blood of Berbers, Arabs, and Spaniards coursing in their veins. Morocco, as I have already explained, was overrun by the Arabs in the seventh century, but the subsequent conquest of Spain was effected chiefly by Berber tribes, which, however, always had a strong admixture of Arab blood and in most respects became Arabized. These Arabized Berbers, settling in the peninsula which they had conquered, became known to the European nations as Moors. The race was also influenced considerably by marriage with the natives of Spain—even to-day the haughtiest of the Spanish grandees proudly boast of their Moorish blood, just as many of the great English nobles trace their descent from the Normans who accompanied William the Conqueror—and when the Moors were finally expelled from Spain they had become almost entirely distinct from their Berber kinsfolk, to whom they were known as Andalusians. While the mountainous regions of Morocco continued to be occupied almost exclusively by people of pure Berber stock, their refugee coreligionists from Spain, the “Moors,” flocked to the coast towns and the plains of Morocco and Algeria, where their descendants, usually referred to as Moresques, are readily distinguishable from the Berbers and the Arabs by their Spanish features. Though the sultans never saw fit to order an enumeration of their subjects, and though, under the French administration, the occupation of a census-taker would not be a healthy one in certain districts, the total population of the empire is estimated at about six millions, including one hundred thousand Europeans, the majority of whom are French and Spanish. By way of offering a familiar comparison, it might be said that Morocco is slightly larger than Texas in area and slightly less than our six New England States in point of population. * * * * * On those of my readers who have stayed with me thus far, but who are doubtless impatient to get on to Fez and Marrákesh, I shall inflict the merest modicum of Moroccan history—two thousand years of conquest, cruelty, and corruption compressed into a tabloid, as it were.