done, and all about him in the perfumed vapor of the bath the white bodies of his boyhood comrades glimmering luminous and opalescent.

His flesh was still asleep, and so was his soul. The hand of his father city bad come closer about him, and for a moment it seemed that he was too weary, or too lazy, to push it away. For a little while he drifted with the warm and perfumed cloud of the hours.

Hands turned him around. It was Houseen Abdelkader, the caid's son, the comrade of long ago-Houseen in silk of wine and silver, hyacinths pendent on his cheeks, a light of festival in his eyes.

"Es-selam alekoum, ya Habib habiby!" It was the salutation in the plural-to Habib, and to the angels that walk, one at either shoulder of every son of God. And as he spoke he threw a new white burnoose over Habib's head, so that it hung down straight and covered him like a bridal veil.

"Alekoum selam, ya Seenou!" It was the name of boyhood, Seenou, the diminutive, that fell from Habib's lips. And he could not call it back.

"Come thou now." He felt the gentle push of Houseen's hands. He found himself moving toward the door that stood open into the street. The light of an outer conflagration was in his eyes. The thin music of lute and tabouka in the court behind him grew thinner; the boom of drums and voices in the street grew big. He had crossed the threshold. A hundred candles, carried in horizontal banks on laths by little boys, came around him on three sides, like footlights. And beyond the glare, in the flaming mist, he saw the street Dar-elBey massed with men. All their faces were toward him, hot yellow spots in which the black spots of their mouths gaped and vanished.

"That the marriage of Habib be blessed! Blessed be the marriage of Habib!"

The riot of sound began to take form. It began to emerge in a measure, a boom-boom-boom of tambours and big

goatskin drums. A bamboo fife struck into a high, quavering note. The singing club of Sidibou-Saïd joined voice.

The footlights were moving forward. toward the street of the market. Habib moved with them a few slow paces, without effort or will. And again they had all stopped. It could not be more than two hundred yards to the house of the notary and his waiting bride, but by the ancient tradition of Kairwan an hour must be consumed on the way.

An hour! An eternity! Panic came over Habib. He turned his hooded eyes for some path of escape. To the right, Houseen! To the left, close at his shoulder, Mohammed Sherif-Mohammed the laughing and the well-beloved— Mohammed, with whom in the long, white days he used to chase lizards by the pool of the Aglabides . . . in the long, white, happy days, while beyond the veil of palms the swaying camel palanquins of women, like huge, bright blooms, went northward up the Tunis road.

"Boom - boom!" The monotonous pulse, the slow minor slide of sixteenth tones, the stark rests he felt the hypnotic pulse of the old music tampering with the pulse of his blood. It gave him a queer creeping fright. He shut his eyes, as if that would keep it out. And in the glow of his lids he saw the tents on the naked desert; he saw the forms of veiled women; he saw the horses of warriors coming like a breaker over the sandthe horses of the warriors of God!

He pulled the burnoose over his lids to make them dark. And even in the

dark he could see. He saw two eyes gazing at his, untroubled, untroubling, out of the desert night. And they were the eyes of any woman-the eyes of his bride, of his sister, his mother, the eyes of his mothers a thousand years dead.

"Master!" they said.

They were pushing him forward by the elbows, Mohammed and Houseen. He opened his eyes. The crowd swam before him through the yellow glow. Something had made an odd breach in his soul, and through the breach came memories.

Memories! There at his left was the smoky shelf of blind Moulay's caféblack-faced, white-eyed old Moulay. Moulay was dead now, many years, but the men still sat in the same attitudes, holding the same cups, smoking the same chibouk with the same gulping of bubbles as in the happy days. And there between the café and the souk gate was the same whitewashed niche where three lads used to sit with their feet tucked under their little kashabias, their chechias awry on their shaven polls, and their lips pursed to spit after the leather legs of the infidel conquerors passing by. The Roumi, the French blasphemers, the defilers of the mosque! Spit on the dogs! Spit!

Behind his reverie the drums boomed, the voices chanted. The lament of drums and voices beat at the back of his brain-while he remembered the three lads sitting in the niche, waiting from one white day to another for the coming of Moulay Saa, the Messiah; watching for the Holy War to begin.

"And I shall ride in the front rank of the horsemen, please God!"

"And I, I shall ride at Moulay Saa's right hand, please God, and I shall cut the necks of Roumi with my sword, like barley straw!"

Habib advanced in the spotlight of the candles. Under the burnoose his face, half shadowed, looked green and white, as if he were sick to his death. Or, perhaps, as if he were being born again.

The minutes passed, and they were hours. The music went on, interminable,

It hung under the pepper trees, drunk with the beauty of flesh, fainting with passion. Above the trees mute lightning played in the cloud. Habib ben Habib was born again. Again, after exile, he came back into the heritage. He saw the heaven of the men of his race. He saw Paradise in a walking dream. He saw women forever young and forever lovely in a land of streams, women forever changing, forever virgin, forever new; strangers intimate and tender. The angels of a creed of love-or of lust!

"Lust is the thing you find where you don't find trust."

eyes

A thin echo of the Frenchman's diatribe flickered through his memory, and he smiled. He smiled because his were open now. He seemed to see this Christian fellow sitting on his bed, barefooted, rumple-haired, talking dogmatically of perfumes and vials and stoppers thrown away, talking of faith in women. And that was the jest. For he seemed to see the women, over there in Paris, that the brothers of that naïve fellow trusted

trusted alone with a handsome young university student from Tunisia. Haha-ha! Now he remembered. He wanted to laugh out loud at a race of men that could be as simple as that. He wanted to laugh at the bursting of the iridescent bubble of faith in the virtue of beautiful women. The Arab knew!

A color of health was on his face; his step had grown confident. Of a sudden, and very quietly, all the mixed past was

brides, her eyebrows were painted in thick black arches, her lips drawn in scarlet, her cheeks splashed with rose. Her face was a mask and jewels in a crust hid the flame of her hair. Under the stiff kohl of their lids her eyes turned neither to the left nor to the right. She seemed not to breathe. It is a dishonor for a maid to look or to breathe in the moment when her naked face suffers for the first time the gaze of the lord whom she has never seen.

A minute passed away.

"This is the thing that is mine!" A blinding exultation ran through his

What a fool! What a fool he had been! He wanted to run now. The lassitude of months was gone from his limbs. He wanted to fling aside that clogging crowd, run, leap, arrive. How long was this hour? Where was he? He tried to see the housetops to know, but the glow was in his eyes. He felt the hands of his comrades on his arms.

But now there was another sound in the air. His ears, strained to the alert, caught it above the drums and voicesa thin, high ulullation. It came from behind high walls and hung among the leaves of the trees, a phantom yodeling, the welcoming "you-you-you-you" of the women of Islam.

Before him he saw that the crowd had vanished. Even the candles went away. There was a door, and the door was open.

He entered, and no one followed. He penetrated alone into an empty house of silence, and all around him the emptiness moved and the silence rustled.

He traversed a court and came into a chamber where there was a light. He saw a negress, a Sudanese duenna, crouching in a corner and staring at him with white eyes. He turned toward the other side of the room.

She sat on a high divan, like a throne, her hands palms together, her legs crossed. In the completeness of her immobility she might have been a doll, or a corpse. After the strict fashion of

VOL CXLIV.-No. 859.-4

'trust' of fools and infidels! No question here of 'faith.' Here I know! I know that this thing that is mine has not been bandied about by the eyes of all the men in the world. I know that this perfume has never been breathed by the passers in the street. I know that it has been treasured from the beginning in a secret place against this moment-for me. This bud has come to its opening in a hidden garden; no man has ever looked upon it; no man will ever look upon it. None but I."

He roused himself. He moved nearer, consumed with the craving and exquisite curiosity of the new. He stood before the dais and gazed into the unwavering eyes. As he gazed, as his sight forgot the grotesque doll painting of the face around those eyes, something queer began to come over him. A confusion. Something bothering. A kind of fright. "Thou!" he breathed.

Her icy stillness endured. Not once did her dilated pupils waver from the straight line. Not once did her bosom lift with breath.

"Nekaf! . . . I am afraid!"

Habib turned away and went out of the house.

In the house of bel-Kalfate the Jewess danced, still, even in voluptuous motion, a white drift of disdain. The music The music eddied under the rayed awning. Raillery and laughter were magnified. More than a little bokha, the forbidden liquor distilled of figs, had been consumed in secret. Eyes gleamed; lips hung. Alone in the thronged court, on the dais, the host and the notary, the caid, the cadi and the cousin from the south continued to converse in measured tones, holding their coffee cups in their palms.

"It comes to me, on thought," pronounced bel-Kalafe, inclining his head toward the notary with an air of courtly deprecation-"it comes to me that thou hast been defrauded. For what is a trifle of ten thousand douros of silver as against the rarest jewel (I am certain, sidi) that has ever crowned the sex which thou mayest perhaps forgive me for mentioning?"

And in the same tone, with the same gesture, Hadji Daoud replied: "Nay, master and friend, by the Beard of the Prophet, but I should repay thee the half. For that is a treasure for a sultan's daughter, and this fillette of mine (forgive me) is of no great beauty or worth

"In saying that, Sidi Hadji, thou sayest a thing which is at odds with half the truth."

They were startled at the voice of Habib coming from behind their backs.

"For thy daughter, Sidi Hadji, thy Zina, is surely as lovely as the full moon sinking in the west in the hour before the dawn."

The words were fair. But bel-Kalfate was looking at his son's face.

"Where are thy comrades?" he asked, in a low voice. "How hast thou come?” Then, with a hint of haste: "The dance is admirable. It would be well that we should remain quiet, Habib, my son."

But the notary continued to face the young man. He set his cup down and

clasped his hands about his knee. The knuckles were a little white.

"May I beg thee, Habib ben Habib, that thou shouldst speak the thing which is in thy mind?”

"There is only this, sidi; a little thing: When thou hast another bird to vend in the market of hearts, it would perhaps be well to examine with care the cage in which thou hast kept that bird.

"Thy daughter," he added, after a moment of silence-"thy daughter, Sidi Hadji, is with child."

That was all that was said. Hadji Daoud lifted his cup and drained it, sucking politely at the dregs. The cadi coughed. The caid raised his eyes to the awning and appeared to listen. Then he observed, "To-night, in-cha-'llah, it will rain." The notary pulled his burnoose over his shoulders, groped down with his toes for his slippers, and got to his feet. "Rest in well-being!" he said. Then, without haste, he went out.

Habib followed him tardily as far as the outer door. In the darkness of the empty street he saw the loom of the man's figure moving off toward his own house, still without any haste.

"And in the night of thy marriage thy husband, or thy father, if thou hast a father-"

Habib did not finish with the memory. He turned and walked a few steps along the street. He could still hear the music and the clank of the Jewess's silver in his father's court.. "In-cha-'llah!" she had said, that

night.

...

A

BOUT this time of year, when we close the doors and turn on the radiator, it is possible to approach closer to our real selves than in summer. This is true the more particularly after a season of torrid ferocity like the summer of 1921. Even at its happiest, summer, with its wide vistas, offers too many distractions; it is far too easy to watch the world go by without really seeing it. Four walls, on the other hand, compel concentration. Questions which in midsummer we view languidly or in a spirit of irritation induced by the heat, may be contemplated with philosophic calm when the north wind rides hard and fast and cheerily rattles the shutter. But be not deceived. I have no intention of adding to the pyramid of literature bearing upon the respective merits of Winter and Summer. By these commonplaces I am merely negotiating a cautious approach to graver matters, hoping to establish myself with the reader on terms of our common humanity.

Having heard during the summer much discussion of the changing order, most of it depressingly pessimistic, I am disposed to take advantage of a quiet evening at home to ponder these things yet again. The case of Age versus Youth is one of the oldest on the calendar of the Court of Time; it is perennially lis pendens, never attaining the dignity of res judicata. Nor will it ever be disposed of and final judgment rendered until Time itself shall cease to be; but it adds to the joy of existence for successive generations to dally with the case, bring it to an issue with a fine flourish of sincerity only to find that the plaintiff's witnesses have passed beyond reach of the sheriff's writ, whereupon the original defendant,

having grown old, institutes a proceeding de novo against a new crop of Youth.

Time, sitting placidly upon the bench, must be highly entertained and not a little amused that a case which manifestly never can reach a final decree should reappear upon the records as each new generation begins to assert itself. What really is the gravamen of the ancient complaint? Is the oft-renewed indictment meritorious, and is it supported by competent evidence? Frankly, my sympathies are wholly with Youth, the mystified yet smiling defendant; and, as the plaintiffs are so prone to default or show themselves absurdly unreasonable and violent when they dash in to amend the ancient complaint or to ask postponement of the hearing, I am disposed to change the monotonous routine by invoking an extraordinary process to compel the complainants to appear at the bar forthwith and unfold themselves as to the exact nature of the relief they demand.

Just what is it that those who are so filled with forebodings as to the present and immediately succeeding generations would like restored of what has passed or is passing? A demand for a concrete and definite expression from those who profess to believe that yesterday was a time of nobler aspirations and achievements than to-day would at least lay the burden of proof upon the complainant.

The vanity of age is a curious thing. As we approach fifty most of us who have survived plagues, pestilence, and famine, wars, panics, and the other perils that flesh is heir to, begin to hark back to the good old times when everything was different. Because things were different we foster the delusion that everything was