She stared at the rumbling taxis that splashed hither and thither; at the zig-zag drizzle, the steady downpour, and her eyes suddenly filled. Thoughts of home were awakened within her by the rain. Her brain and heart, hitherto as if congealed by the terror of the strange world before her, now thawed and filled her with a gnawing sadness and self-pity. How is it at home now? her thoughts ran. How is it at home? It rains. There is the muddy road, the ruts and the pools. Father is indoors now, back from the field. The gray dusk falls. Mother sits with folded arms by the window and gazes longingly out into the dark. “Are you looking for me?” the figure in the window, forgetting herself, suddenly wailed. “Mother, mother dear, take me to you. I ain’t used to this; I’m so lonely and afraid.” Her lips trembled visibly. A spasm shot across her face and contracted it--and many of the crowd outside who made “mouths” at her, burst into a triumphant hurrah. “She laughed!” roared a colored man so loud that it reached the manager, who forthwith decided to discharge the “figure.” “I get the prize,” yelled others. “I made her laugh! I made her laugh!” [19] Copyright, 1921, by Brief Stories Publishing Company. Copyright, 1923, by Benjamin Rosenblatt. FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF THE SOUTH[20] By WILBUR DANIEL STEELE (From _The Pictorial Review_) The day had been dead hot. Under the weight of the afternoon one would have thought it could never be cool again in the Mzab. But immediately the sun had dipped behind the cliff that guards the western rim of the oasis the thin air emptied itself, and the night-chill, penetrating and treacherous, flowed over the dry bottom of the _oued_. The town stirred. Under my gallery there came and went a word-fight between Berber muleteers from the north. After that I heard the evening call of the muezzin dropping down from the mosque-tower on the crowded hill, arid, sinuous, like the note of another wooden well-wheel shrilling above the desert floor. Then somewhere under a house arose the hollow voice of a tambour struck with a thumb, and a man sang. In a rift of silence a wandering breeze threshed all the date-fronds in the _oued_-bottom with a phantom of distant applause. Nearer at hand a foot-scuffle in the dusk. A choked laugh. And all around in the heavy shadows of that quarter the subdued giggling, the rustling, and jewel-clanking of the women of dark delight. “What’s wrong with the Ouled Naïl girls to-night?” I asked along the gallery. Abd, son of Abdallah the Mozabite, rose to his feet on the tiles near the stair, a white wraith. “_Kain kairouan ja, sidi._” (There is a caravan come.) Drums banged; women scurried. The momentous night was established and stars sprinkled the sky, large and restless stars, always flickering a little to the eye in that air without body.