his mighty hand a staff hung
with apple-green ribbons. And his smile is as the smile of the rising
sun in an oleograph.

This personage one day blessed the hedgehog's foot I at present possess,
and endowed it solemnly with miraculous curative properties. It would
cure, he declared, all the physical ills that can beset a woman. Then
he gave it into the hands of a great Agha, who was about to take a wife,
accepted a tribute of dates, a grandfather's clock from Paris, and a
grinding organ of Barbary as a small acknowledgment of his generosity,
and probably thought very little more about the matter.

Now, in the course of time, it happened that the hedgehog's foot came
into the possession of a dancing-girl of Touggourt, called Halima. How
Halima got hold of it I cannot say, nor does anyone in Touggourt exactly
know, so far as I am aware. But, alas! even Aghas are sometimes human,
and play pitch and toss with magical things. As Grand Dukes who go to
disport themselves in Paris sometimes hie them incognito to the "Cafe
de la Sorciere," so do Aghas flit occasionally to Touggourt, and appear
upon the high benches of the great dancing-house of the Ouled Nails in
the outskirts of the city. And Halima was young and beautiful. Her
eyes were large, and she wore a golden crown ornamented with very tall
feathers. And she danced the dance of the hands and the dance of the
fainting fit with great perfection. And the wives of Aghas have to put
up with a good deal. However it was, one evening Halima danced with the
hedgehog's foot that had been blessed dangling from her jewelled girdle.
And there was a great scandal in the city.

For in the four quarters of Touggourt, the quarter of the Jews, of the
foreigners, of the freed negroes, and of the citizens proper, it was
known that the hedgehog's foot had been blessed and endowed with magical
powers by the mighty marabout of Tamacine.

Halima herself affirmed it, standing at the front door of her terraced
dwelling in the court, while the other dancers gathered round, looking
like a troop of macaws in their feathers and their finery. With a brazen
pride she boasted that she possessed something worth more than uncut
rubies, carpets from Bagdad, and silken petticoats sewn with sequins.
And the Ouled Nails could not gainsay her. Indeed, they turned their
huge, kohl-tinted eyes upon the relic with envy, and stretched their
painted hands towards it as if to a god in prayer. But Halima would let