And Jeanne—she was with them perhaps. His mother had written that she would often come and keep them company on winter evenings. What was she like now? “Changed and grown still prettier,” he had been told. What was that face like now, that face of the grown-up girl he had never seen? * * * * * By the side of the handsome spahi in his red jacket sat Fatou with her high headdress of amber and copper spangles. Night had fallen, and in the lonely square the little negro girls continued to chase one another, flitting hither and thither in the dusk—one of them entirely nude—the other two looking like white bats with their long floating _bou-bous_. The cold wind incited them to run; they were like kittens in our country, who feel an impulse to gambol wildly when the dry east wind is blowing, which brings us frost. IV A pedantic digression concerning music and a class of people called Griots. * * * * * In the Soudan the art of music is confined to a special hereditary caste of men called griots, who are wandering musicians and composers of heroic songs. It is the griots upon whom devolves the duty of beating the tom-tom for the _bamboulas_, and of singing at festivals the praises of persons of quality. When a chief feels a craving to hear the praises of his own glory, he summons his griots, who seat themselves before him on the sand and extemporise in his honour a long series of special couplets, accompanying their strident voices with the sounds of a small, very primitive guitar, whose strings are strung over serpent skin. The griots are at once the laziest and the most philosophical people on earth. They lead a roaming life, and take no thought for the morrow. From village to village they wander, either alone or in the train of the great warrior chiefs, receiving alms here and there, treated everywhere as pariahs, like the gipsies in Europe—sometimes loaded with gold and favours, like courtesans in our country—excluded during their lifetime from religious ceremonies, and after death from burial grounds. They know plaintive romances with vague mysterious words, heroic songs which hold a suggestion of melody in their monotony and something of the warlike march in their well-marked vigorous rhythm; dance music full of frenzy; love songs like transports of amorous fury, or the roaring of maddened beasts. But in all this negro music, as in that of all primitive races, the melody varies little; it consists of short, mournful phrases, scales of more or less unequal intervals, beginning with the highest notes within the compass of the human voice and descending abruptly to the very lowest, in a dragging, plaintive wail.