That the men of the Ouled-Naïl (which, by the way, is pronounced as though the last syllable were spelled “Nile”) look upon the lives led by their sisters, daughters, and sweethearts with much the same toleration and approval that an up-State farmer shows for the village maid who goes to the city to earn a living as a waitress, a stenographer, or a shop-girl, is proved by a little incident which Mr. S. H. Leeder, the English author-traveller, tells of having once witnessed on the station-platform at Biskra. A tall young tribesman of the Ouled-Naïl, the son of a sheikh of some importance, was leaving Biskra, to which town he had been paying a short visit with his mother. He was taking back with him one of his countrywomen, a dancing-girl named Kadra, who had been a resident in the Rue Sainte, as Biskra's Tenderloin is known, for two or three years, and was quite celebrated for her beauty, with the intention of marrying her. Here was this girl, after such an amazing episode in her career, quietly dressed, veiled to the eyes, and carefully chaperoned by the prospective bridegroom's mother, returning to assume a position of rank and consideration among her own people, while several of her late companions, tears of sorrow at the parting pouring down their unveiled and painted faces, clung to and caressed her with every sign of childlike affection. And such marriages, I have been assured by French officials, are not the exception but the rule in the Ziban. Never was the truth brought home to me more sharply that “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet” than in the land of the Ouled-Naïls, where, unlike our own, it is never too late to mend; not even for a woman. Barring the two who appeared in the production of “The Garden of Allah,” the only genuine Ouled-Naïls ever seen in the United States were those who, owing to the enterprise of some far-seeing showman, were responsible for introducing that orgy of suggestiveness known as the _danse du ventre_ to the American public at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, a dance which, thanks to numerous but unskilled imitators, French, Egyptian, and Syrian, spread from ocean to ocean under the vulgar but descriptive nickname of “the houchee-kouchee.” As a matter of fact, the _danse du ventre_, as seen in the questionable resorts of our own country, has about as much in common with the real dance of the desert people, as performed on a silken carpet spread before the tent of some nomad sheikh, as the so-called “Spanish fandango” of the vaudeville stage has with the inimitably beautiful and difficult dances to be seen at Señor Otero's dancing-academy in Seville. The dance of the Ouled-Naïls is the very essence of Oriental depravity. It is the dance of the pasha's harem; it is the dance of those native cafés which the European tourists are always so eager to visit; it is the dance which every little girl of the tribe is taught—long years before she knows its meaning.