A stranger presenting himself before a _douar_, stands some little way off, and pronounces these words: _Dif rebi_—"a guest sent by Allah." The effect is magical. Whatever may be his condition of life, they throw themselves on him, tear him from one another, and hold his stirrup while he alights. The servants lead away his horse, about whom, if he be a man of good breeding, he will not give himself any further trouble. He himself is almost dragged into a tent, and whatever is ready to hand is set before him, until a banquet can be prepared. Nor is less attention shown to a traveller on foot. The master of the tent keeps his guest company throughout the whole of the day, and only leaves him to make way for sleep. No indiscreet questions are ever asked, such as: Whence comest thou? Who art thou? Whither goest thou? There is no instance of any evil having ever befallen a stranger thus received as a guest, even though he were a mortal enemy. At his departure, the master of the tent will say to him: "Follow thy good fortune;" and after the guest has fairly taken his departure, his entertainer is no longer answerable for anything. In retiring from the hospitable repast, if the stranger pass before a _douar_ and be seen, he is obliged again to accept the invitations that are pressed upon him. A certain class of men live entirely on alms and hospitality. These are the dervishes. Absorbed in prayer, these pious individuals are the object of universal veneration. "Beware of offering them an insult, for Allah will punish you." A request made by them is never refused. By the side of these mendicant monks, who so exactly reproduce a particular feature of the Middle Ages, it seems appropriate to place the _tolbas_, or learned men, and the "wise women," who fill in the Sahara the part that belonged in the olden times to the magicians, alchemists, and sorcerers, and those other impostors celebrated by Tasso and Ariosto, and ridiculed by Cervantes. It is to these _tolbas_ and aged dames that both men and women apply for a philter, composed of various herbs prepared with solemn invocations and awesome or grotesque ceremonies, which is mixed with the food of the swain or damsel whose love is longed for. It is they, again, who write magic words and the name of the hated one on a piece of paper and a dead man's bone taken from a cemetery, and then bury together the paper and the bone, which will soon be joined by the enemy, "with his belly full of worms." They will teach you, too, the formula you must pronounce while closing your knife, in order to sever the life of an odious rival; and that which you must throw into the furnace over which is being cooked the food of the family you would poison; and that which you must write on a copper plate, or flattened ball, to be flung into the stream whither repairs to drink the woman on whom you would avenge yourself—seized with a dysentery as rapid as the river, she will die, if she do not yield herself up to you.