Because I am a collector of weapons and curios in a modest way, and because I positively revel in colors, I lose no time when in Tunis in making my way to the Souk des Etoffes. To my way of thinking it is one of the most fascinating streets in the world, its tiny shops literally filled to overflowing with silks, damasks, velvets, brocades, embroideries, of every tone and texture—turquoise blue, pale green, amethyst, ruby red, old rose, burnt orange, purple, magenta, vermilion, saffron yellow—the fruit of looms all the way from India to Morocco. Stacked high are piles of carpets from Anatolia, Kurdistan, Daghestan, Persia, Afghanistan, Kairouan; the last-named a Tunisian product, surprisingly cheap but well worth buying, for it is as thick and soft as a fur rug, in lovely, mellow shades of ivory, red, and brown. These Tunisian rug-merchants are past masters in the fine art of salesmanship; they will fling a silken carpet into the air with the hand of a magician and permit it to settle gradually upon the floor, not flat but in little hills and valleys of rich, tempting colors, the folds serving to reveal the intricacy of the design and accentuating the silky sheen. I have no slightest intention of purchasing a carpet, no place to use one if I had it, but, for the sake of politeness, I feel constrained to ask its price. “Twelve hundred pounds,” says the merchant, without batting an eyelash. “_Trop cher_,” I remark, as though buying six-thousand-dollar carpets was with me an everyday affair. [Illustration: CHURCH AND STATE IN TUNISIA Father Delattre, in charge of the excavations at Carthage H. H. Sidi Mohamed el Habib, Bey of Tunis] The merchant shrugs his shoulders as though pitying my ignorance of values. It is a very fine carpet, he assures me earnestly, very old, very rare. The “ivory” in it is quite exceptional. Only last week he sold a pair of such carpets to the American millionaire, Meester Otto Kahn. By way of convincing me he displays the New York banker’s visiting-card. “But I am not a millionaire,” I explain. “Monsieur is pleased to jest with me,” says the merchant flatteringly. “Is he not an American?” Realizing that to deny the imputation is worse than useless, I turn my attention to the other objects in the crowded little room—silver-mounted rifles with enormously long barrels, their stocks inlaid with ivory, mother-of-pearl, or turquoise matrix; poignards with jewel-studded hilts; exquisitely damascened simitars, their curved blades inscribed with verses from the Koran; Saracenic helmets with hoods of chain-mail; exquisite embroideries worked by the deft fingers of harem women; quaint pieces of enamel jewelry out of the Grande Kabylie; miniatures on ivory of ferocious-looking, fiercely mustached beys and pashas, their turbans the size of sofa-cushions; strings of perfectly matched amber beads, as large as cherries and as red.