the long-drawn-out marriage feast is over, the hideous racket of the flutes and tom-toms ceases and the wedding guests depart. Alone in her tent, the bride awaits her husband, who will see her face for the first time. Seating himself by her side, her husband makes her take off, one by one, her necklaces, her rings, and her anklets, so that, unadorned, she may be estimated at her true worth. If, thus stripped of her finery, she is not up to his expectations, the man may even at this late hour declare the marriage off and send the girl back to her parents. Should he be satisfied with his latest acquisition—for it is more than likely that he already has three or four other wives—he produces a club, which he places on the floor beside her, a custom whose significance requires no explanation. An Arab husband does not confine himself to a stick in regulating his domestic affairs, however, for only a few months ago the French authorities of Oran divested a desert sheikh of the burnoose of authority because, in a fit of jealous rage, he had cut off his wife's nose. [Illustration: AN ARAB BRIDE GOING TO HER HUSBAND. “Followed by rejoicing relatives, the bride is taken to her husband's home in a swaying camel litter which looks like a young balloon.” _Photograph by Em. Frechon, Biskra._] CHAPTER IV THE ITALIAN “WHITE MAN'S BURDEN” Since the world began the arm of Italy has reached out into the Mediterranean toward Africa, its finger pointing straight at Tripoli. Phœnicians, Greeks, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, Spaniards, and Turks followed the suggestion of that finger in their turn, but of them all only the Arab and the Turk remain. In every case a colonial empire was the mirage which beckoned to those land-hungry peoples from behind the golden haze which hangs over the African coast-line, and in every case their African adventures ended in disappointment and disaster. After an interim of centuries, in which the roads and ramparts and reservoirs built along that shore by those primeval pioneers have crumbled into dust, the troop-laden transports of a regenerated Italy have followed in the wake of those Greek galleys, those Roman triremes, and those Spanish caravels. Undeterred by the recollection of her disastrous Abyssinian adventure, Italy is imbued with the idea, just as were her powerful predecessors, that her commercial and political interests demand the extension of her dominion across the Middle Sea.