them about America. But there is another Sok, the Outer Sok, beyond the walls, where the camels and the story-tellers come, and this is no hybrid place, but ‘real Morocco,’ and as fine a Sok as any town but Fez or Marakesh can show. Here, across a great open space that rises gradually from the outer walls, are stretched rows upon rows of ragged tents as high as one’s shoulder, and before them sit their keepers: Arab barbers ready to shave a head from ear to ear or leave a tuft of hair; unveiled Berber women, generally tattooed, selling grapes and prickly pears, or as they call them, Christian figs; Soudanese, sometimes freemen, trading or holding ponies for hire; women from the Soudan, generally pock-marked and mostly slaves, squatting among their masters’ vegetables; Riff men who have come perhaps from forty miles away to sell a load of charcoal worth two francs; pretty little half-veiled girls, with one earring, selling bread broken into half and quarter loaves; soldiers feeling the weight of each small piece and asking for half a dozen seeds of pomegranate as an extra inducement to buy; minstrels and snake-charmers and bards; water-carriers tinkling bells; blind beggars with their doleful chants--‘Allah, Allah-la’; camel-drivers; saints. At dark the big Sok goes to bed with the camels and the donkeys and the sheep; man and beast bed down together; and it is an eerie place to pick one’s way through when the night is dark. From choice we lived, when in Tangier, across the big Sok, at the Hôtel Cavilla, and sometimes of an evening, after dinner, would descend the slope, passing through the gates, down the narrow, cobbled streets, to the Soko Chico, with its flaring cafés, to sit perhaps and watch a Moorish kaid pit his skill at chess against a German champion. It was the business of Kaid Driss, commander of artillery, to be in readiness at this central square to go to any gate which Raisuli or another hostile leader might suddenly attack; and so this splendid Moor, a well-liked gentleman, spent the weary hours until midnight at this, the Moors’ favourite game. Around the corners, under dank arches, slept his troops, covered even to their noses, their guns, too, underneath their white jelebas. Except the Kaid himself there seemed to be no other Moorish soldier stirring after nine, or at the latest, ten o’clock, and if we should delay our stay within the walls beyond this hour, nothing but a Spanish or other coin more valuable than a Moorish piece would quiet the complaining brave who pulled himself together to unbar the gates for us to pass. It is not only, however, when the sun is down that the Moor sleeps; he sleeps by day, as he tells you his religion teaches, and rolled in woollen cloth lies anywhere that slumber overtakes him, in the sands upon the beach, on the roadway under gates--what difference does it make, the earth is sweet and a hard bed is best! Why work like the Christian to spend like a fool?