Guides, touts, and Jewish shopkeepers do their utmost to ruin the visitor’s enjoyment by their incessant importunities and whines. “Good morning, meester.... Good morning, madame.... How are you?... Look here.... I show you sometheeng ... sometheeng ver’ fine ... ver’ cheap ... no charge ... you come in quite free ... you not buy anything unless you wish.... No, sare, I not damn nuisance.... I ver’ honest fellow....” Cringing, impudent, and furtive-eyed, they are as pertinacious as flies and as irritating as fleas, the only wonder being that they are not occasionally murdered by Europeans who have been exasperated beyond endurance. On one occasion I saw a Frenchman kick one of these parasites the entire length of a _souk_, and I felt like shaking hands with him as a public benefactor. Now and then a gorgeously appareled _caïd_, a figure out of the Arabian Nights, clatters through the narrow streets astride a snorting Arab, negro slaves trotting at his stirrups. Snake-charmers, fire-eaters, story-tellers, do their hackneyed stuff in the open spaces before the city gates, surrounded by spectators packed four-deep who applaud the performances with the naïveté of children. The faithful squat beside the fountains of the mosques, bathing their hands and feet and rinsing their mouths in running water, as the Koran prescribes, before entering the sanctuaries to prostrate themselves in prayer with their faces toward the Holy Places. Occasionally one sees a wild-looking scarecrow of a figure, a holy man from the desert, caked with filth, his hair and beard matted, his patchwork rags of many colors, beseeching the passers-by in a shrill whine for alms in the name of Allah the Compassionate, the Merciful—and cursing them with enviable fluency if his importunities go unheeded. The most characteristic and interesting feature of Tunis is the _souks_, or covered bazaars. Nowhere in the Nearer East are there any _souks_ which can equal them; for in Constantinople, by virtue of the Angora government’s passion for westernizing everything Turkish, the men have been compelled to discard their turbans and tarbooshes for hats and caps and the women to doff their mystery-suggestive veils, more’s the pity! The bazaars of Cairo are not only deficient in architectural merit but, particularly during the tourist season, are not much better than the Oriental section of an exposition. In Damascus the bazaar buildings resembled railway-stations even before French shells laid in ruins the Street Which Is Called Straight. Indeed, one would need to go as far eastward as Tehran or Ispahan to find _souks_ which can compare with those of Tunis in extent, beauty, color, and picturesqueness.