With regard to the former a few words must be said. Mulai Omar, who had been left as viceroy by Mulai el Hassen, whose son he was by a slave wife, is a young man of extremely vicious and degenerate habits, nearly black in colour, and with an expression as ugly as it is revolting. While beyond his immorality no actual charge of crime can be laid to his door, he may be said to be incapable of filling the position he held, and to want discretion and common-sense. It appears—and I knew of the event at the time—that on his learning of the death of his father, he sent to the Jewish silversmiths, by whom all Government work is done, and ordered one of their number to make him a seal. Now in Morocco a seal is an exceedingly important object, and no one uses a seal of office unless it is actually presented to him by the Sultan. So far the story is generally known, but here my version—the true version—differs, for while the European press harped upon the fact that Mulai Omar wished to make himself a seal with the inscription of Sultan upon it, the fact was that the seal was to bear Mulai Abdul Aziz’s name, and that the reason of Mulai Omar’s ordering it to be made was not in order to stamp documents himself as Sultan, but probably to have in his possession a means of forging letters supposed to have come from Court. Whether his idea was by this to make the best of the short period that remained to him as viceroy to amass money, or whether in case of any outbreak or disturbance on the part of the population to be able to forge conciliatory or other letters that would keep them quiet until his brother’s arrival, it is impossible to say. But whatever may have been the desire, the result in the suspicious eyes of his brother was this—that he had attempted by some means to usurp the throne. However, the seal was never made. The Jew artificer, knowing the penalty that would meet him at the hands of the Sultan were he even the innocent instrument in this, fled and sought the protection of an influential member of the Government, and the affair was knocked on the head at once.