The peculiar dances of the Ouled-Naïls demand many years of arduous and constant practice. A girl is scarcely out of her cradle before, under the tutelage of her mother, who has herself been a _danseuse_ in her time, she begins the inconceivably severe course of gymnastics and muscle training which is the foundation of their strange and suggestive dances. From infancy until, scarcely in her teens, she bids farewell to the tent life of the desert and sets out to make her fortune in the cities along the African littoral, she is as carefully groomed and trained as a colt entered at the county fair. Morning, noon, and night, day after day, year after year, the muscles of her chest, her back, her hips, and her abdomen are developed and trained and suppled until they will respond to her wishes as readily as her slender, henna-stained fingers. Her lustrous, blue-black hair is brushed and combed and oiled and brushed again; she is taught to play the hautboy, the zither, and the flute and to sing the weird and plaintive songs the Arab loves; to make the thick, black native coffee and with inimitable dexterity to roll a cigarette. By the time she is thirteen she is ready to make her début in the dance-hall of some Algerian town, whence, after three or four or possibly five years of a life of indifferent virtue, she returns, a-clank with gold pieces, to the tented village from which she came, to marry some sheikh or camel-dealer and to bear him children, who, if they are boys, will don the white turban and scarlet burnoose of the Spahis and serve in the armies of France, or, if they are girls, will live the life of their mother all over again. It will be seen, therefore, that the profession is an hereditary one, which _all_ the women of the tribe pursue without incurring, so far as I could learn, a hint of scandal or a trace of shame. It is a queer business, and one to which no other country, so far as I am aware, offers a parallel, for whereas the geishas of Japan, the nautches of India, and the odalisques of Turkey are but classes, the Ouled-Naïls are a race, as distinct in features, language, and customs as the Bedouin, the Nubian, or the Jew.