eeling.

"Keep them," he would answer; "keep them until I come again," intending
to tell them, when that time came, to keep their poor gifts altogether.

And when he had passed out of the province of Tetuan into the bashalic
of El Kasar, the bareheaded country-people of the valley of the Koos
hastened before him to the Kaid of that grey town of bricks and storks
and palm-trees and evil odours, and the Kaid, with another notion of his
errand, came to the tumble-down bridge to meet him on his approach in
the early morning.

"Peace be with you!" said the Kaid. "So my lord is going again to the
Shereef at Wazzan; may the mercy of the Merciful protect him!"

Israel neither answered yea nor nay, but threaded the maze of
crooked lanes to the lodging which had been provided for him near
the market-place, and the same night he left the town (laden with the
presents of the Kaid) through a line of famished and half-naked beggars
who looked on with feverish eyes.

Next day, at dawn, he came to the heights of Wazzan (a holy city of
Morocco), by the olives and junipers and evergreen oaks that grow at the
foot of the lofty, double-peaked Boo-Hallal, and there the young grand
Shereef himself, at the gate of his odorous orange-gardens, stood
waiting to give audience with yet another conjecture as to the intention
of his journey.

"Welcome! welcome!" said the Shereef; "all you see is yours until Allah
shall decree that you leave me too soon on your happy mission to our
lord the Sultan at Fez--may God prolong his life and bless him!"

"God make you happy!" said Israel, but he offered no answer to the
question that was implied.

"It is twenty and odd years, my lord," the Shereef continued, "since my
father sent for you out of Tetuan, and many are the ups and downs that
time has wrought since then, under Allah's will; but none in the past
have been so grateful as the elevation of Israel ben Oliel, and none in
the future can be so joyful as the favours which the Sultan (God keep
our lord Abd er-Rahman!) has still in store for him."

"God will show," said Israel.

No Jew had ever yet ridden in this Moroccan Mecca; but the Shereef
alighted from his horse and offered it to Israel, and took Israel's
horse instead and together they rode through the market-place, and past
the old Mosque that is a ruin inhabited by hawks and the other mosque
of the Aissawa, and the three squalid fondaks wherein the Jews live
like cattle. A swarm of Arab