An Englishman who knows Abdul Aziz and has for years advised him, tells me of a ride they took together accompanied only by their private servants, when the Court was formerly at Rabat, five years ago. The Sultan left the palace grounds with the hood of his _jeleba_ drawn well down over his face, his servant likewise thoroughly covered in the garment that levels all Moors, men and women, to the same ghost-like appearance. Sultan and man met the Englishman outside the town walls at the ruins of Shella, a secluded place grown over with cactus bushes, and rode with him on into the country fifteen miles or more. On the way back they encountered a storm of rain, and drenched to the skin, their horses floundering in the slipping clay, they drew up at the back walls of the palace and tried to get an entrance by a gate always barred. ‘What shall we do?’ asked the Sultan. ‘Get your servant to climb the wall,’ said the Englishman. ‘No; you get yours,’ said Abdul Aziz, always contrary. So the Englishman’s servant climbed the wall, dropped on the other side, and made his way to the palace, where he was promptly arrested and flogged for a lying thief, no one taking the trouble to go to see if his tale was true. After the Sultan and the Englishman had waited for some time, they rode round to another gate and entered. Then the unfortunate servant of the Christian was set free and given five dollars Hassani to heal his welted skin. But things have changed. On the present visit of the Sultan to Rabat he no longer rides out except in great State; and this he does (on the advice partly of that particular Englishman of the wall adventure) every Friday regularly. In September, while Abdul Aziz was on the road from Fez, hastening to anticipate his brother in getting to this, the war capital of Morocco (where, as the Moors say, the Sultan might listen with both ears, to the North and to the South), public criers from the rival camp of Mulai Hafid declared that Abdul Aziz was coming to the coast to be baptized a Christian under the guns of the infidel men-of-war. But this lie was easy to refute without the humiliation of a deliberate contradiction. Though at Fez it has always been the custom of the Sultan to worship at a private mosque within the grounds of his palace, it is likewise the custom for him at Rabat to go with a great fanfare and all his household and the Maghzen through lines of troops as long as he can muster, to a great public mosque in the open fields between the town’s outer and inner walls.