In the Ghetto of Sidi-bel-Abbès no trifle is so small that it is not worth haggling about, and no proposition paltry enough to come amiss to the man of the Ghetto, whose love of money is so great that he does not despise even the Legion's small copper pieces. The Ghetto and the Foreign Legion have quite lively business connections, consisting principally in the change of small currency notes. Many banknotes which originally formed the kernel of a légionnaire's letter from home have wandered into the mysterious channels of Jewish trade. The Ghetto of Sidi-bel-Abbès has earned a small fortune in these small transactions. A légionnaire is seldom much of a man of business and he certainly is always in a big hurry to get his dollar or his five marks or his five pesetas changed into francs and centimes--so he submits with more or less grace to fantastic rates of exchange, getting little more than three francs for a dollar and about four francs for a "fünf Mark Schein." All other business of the Ghetto with the soldiers of the Legion is equally profitable--for the other man, be it understood, not, of course, for the légionnaire. Very often men of the Legion steal, under cover of darkness, silently through the little streets of the Jewish quarter carrying big bundles of brown woollen blankets and blue sashes, stamped in the middle and at the corners with the Legion's stamp in white paint, which marks them clearly as regimental property. But what's in a stamp! It can be got rid of easily enough with good will and a little turpentine.... Anything that a légionnaire may want to sell the second-hand merchants of Sidi-bel-Abbès buy; at prices below contempt, it is true, but all the same they buy it. The small silver coins of the Ghetto have been the ruin of more than one soldier of the Legion who in a fit of rage sold his uniform to the obliging trader and paid the penalty with a long term of imprisonment. Thus the interests of the Ghetto and the interests of the Legion are identical in a small way, and as a result the Ghetto man and the soldier are quite friendly with each other.