Abd el Kader was sent to France as a prisoner of war. I never saw him there; but I can well remember a picturesque group of his captains, dressed in their long white burnouses, with the camel’s hair fastening to their flowing white head-dresses, riding in haughty unconcern and thinking the unfathomable thoughts of Orientals, in the Place de la Concorde. Abd el Kader was sent to France, where he lived, of course, as a prisoner, but treated with the greatest consideration, until in 1852 Louis Napoléon very generously gave him his liberty with an allowance of £4,000 a year. He took up his residence first at Broussa and then at Damascus, where during the Christian massacres of 1860 he played a noble part, doing all that was in his power to protect the wretched Maronites. Many a night he slept on the threshold of his house door with his drawn scimitar by his side, that he, holy Hadji as he was, might be ready to give succour and refuge to any hunted infidel who might pass that way. For his services in those troublous times the French Emperor sent him the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour; right well had he earned it. One more trait of the generous old hero’s character. When France at the end of 1870 was bleeding at every pore, the Arabs thought that their opportunity had come for a rising in Algiers. It was said that Abd el Kader’s son and his people were brewing trouble. This roused the old man’s wrath; he sent a fierce message to his son, in which he said that in his youth he had resisted the French with all his might for many years. For nearly a quarter of a century now he had been at peace with them, and they had treated him as a friend. He would disown any son of his who might take a mean advantage of their trouble and break the honourable peace which he had concluded. Spurred by memories of childhood and early youth, I was keen—mad-keen—to see that wonderful warrior, a sort of Oriental Garibaldi whose life had been one long romance. We were admitted at rather a shabby entrance door with nothing to distinguish it from those of the neighbouring houses—a dark passage led us into one of those delightful courtyards which are the chief fascination of an Eastern gentleman’s dwelling. A marble verandah, with oleanders in huge tubs placed here and there—in the open space the music of a plashing fountain. In this sunlit court the great Emir received us. He was then a man of sixty-four years. He was dressed in a white robe in the old Arab fashion, with the cord of camel’s hair tied round his head-dress. His beard was shaved and dyed to resemble that of a young man, his eyebrows were blackened, and his cheeks were slightly rouged. Before him stood one of those X-shaped book-rests inlaid with mother of pearl with which Liberty has made us all familiar, and on it rested a scroll in the study of which he was deeply engrossed. It was a book on MAGIC! Wonderful still are the ways of the East.