she must be there to nurse the chief should anything happen to him. “In fact,” she added, “we have one foot in the stirrup, for we must start for the desert to-morrow morning.” We had a long talk, for she was a keen questioner, and then she insisted on taking us to an adjoining paddock to see the horses. There we were joined by her husband, Sheik Medjwal, the brother of the head of the clan Mizrab, a branch of the Anazel tribe. The Sheik was not an imposing personage—indeed, anything but one’s ideal of a great lord of the desert; as a matter of fact, he was quite an ordinary, common-looking little man. Nevertheless she seemed very fond and proud of him, and evidently in this wild, nomad life between the desert and Damascus she had found a happy haven of rest after the adventures of her stormy youth. When at last she let us go she made me promise to go back to Damascus and visit her again. When, after many years, I did go back, poor Lady Ellenborough was no more. As we came away, I asked Burton whether she was safe with these people. He assured me that she was quite secure, if only for the reason that she had a few hundreds a year of her own—perhaps £1,500—and that was, of course, a fortune for the tribe, and a brevet of safety for her. There was living at Damascus at that time one man whom, above all others, I was eager to see, and that man was the great Emir Abd el Kader. Burton, who knew him well, was able to introduce me to him. Probably to the present generation his name is hardly known; but in my boyhood the Arab chieftain, who from 1832 to 1847 resisted army after army of the French, was as famous as Saladin himself. Fearless as the steel of his own scimitar, the soul of honour, with all the glamour and mystery of the East wedded to the chivalry of the West. What a portrait would Sir Walter Scott have painted of him! In the early years of the nineteenth century Algiers was a nest of pirates, the terror of the Mediterranean. When the French remonstrated in defence of their coral fishers, who were in continual danger of being robbed, murdered, or sold as slaves, the Dey haughtily refused to receive their message, and even went so far as to strike their Consul. He had to pay the penalty. But when at last the victorious French were masters of Algiers, their work was but half accomplished. The Dey was beaten—the pirate-ships were taken or destroyed—yet in the interior, in the unmeasurable desert, the wild Arab tribes were gathering to defend their liberties and independence which they saw threatened by the presence of the Giaour on their coast. For centuries they had been under the yoke first of the Romans, then of the Turks. The Ottoman power was now broken, and they would be no slaves to the hated infidel. The moment for gaining freedom had come.