The next time you happen to be in Tunis don't fail to pay a visit to the divorce court. It is the most Haroun-al-Raschidic institution this side of Samarkand. A great hall of justice, vaulted and floored with marble and strewn with Eastern carpets, forms the setting, while husbands in turbans and lawyers in tarbooshes, white-veiled women and green-robed, gray-bearded judges complete a scene which might have been taken straight from the _Arabian Nights_. The women, closely veiled and hooded, and herded like so many cattle within an iron grill, take no part in the proceedings which so intimately affect their futures, their interests being left in the hands of a voluble and gesticulative _avocat_. On either side of the hall is a series of alcoves, and in each alcove, seated cross-legged on a many-cushioned divan, is a gold-turbaned and green-robed _cadi_. To him the husband states his case, the wife putting in her defence—if she has any—through her lawyer and rarely appearing in person. The judge considers the facts in silence, gravely stroking his long, gray beard, and then delivers his decision—in nine cases out of ten, so I was told, in favour of the husband. Should either party be dissatisfied, he or she can take an appeal by the simple process of walking across the room and laying the case before one of the judges sitting on the other side, whose decision is final. A case, even if appealed, is generally disposed of in less than an hour and at a total cost of six francs, which goes to show that the record for quick-and-easy divorces is not held by Reno. It is characteristic of the Moslem view-point that infidelity on the part of the husband is no cause for divorce whatsoever, while infidelity on the part of the wife, owing to the strict surveillance under which Moslem women are kept and the prison-like houses in which they are confined, occurs so rarely as to be scarcely worth mentioning. Should a Moslem woman so far succeed in evading the vigilance of her jailers as to enter into a liaison with a man, instead of a divorce trial there would be two funerals. To put his wife and her paramour out of the way without detection is a matter of no great difficulty for an Arab husband, for if any one disappears in a Mohammedan country the harem system renders a search extremely difficult, if not, indeed, wholly out of the question. In fact, it has happened very frequently, especially in such populous centres as Tangier, Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and Cairo, that a man has enticed his rival into his house, either keeping him a prisoner for life or slowly killing him by torture. Though the French authorities are perfectly well aware of such occurrences, neither they in Algeria and Tunisia nor the English in Egypt feel themselves strongly enough intrenched to risk the outburst of fanaticism which would inevitably ensue should they violate the privacy of a harem.