on's Haidee. Or was it perhaps
the third, less pretty but more vivid and animated, who sat behind the
tea-tray, and mimicked so expressively a soldier shouldering his rifle,
and another falling dead, in her effort to ask us "when the dreadful war
would be over"? Perhaps ... unless, indeed, it were the handsome
octoroon, slightly older than the others, but even more richly dressed,
so free and noble in her movements, and treated by the others with such
friendly deference.

I was struck by the fact that among them all there was not a child; it
was the first harem without babies that I had seen in that prolific
land. Presently one of the ladies asked Mme. de S. about her children,
in reply, she enquired for the Caid's little boy, the son of his wife
who had died. The ladies' faces lit up wistfully, a slave was given an
order, and presently a large-eyed ghost of a child was brought into the
room.

Instantly all the bracelet-laden arms were held out to the dead woman's
son; and as I watched the weak little body hung with amulets and the
heavy head covered with thin curls pressed against a brocaded bosom, I
was reminded of one of the coral-hung child-Christs of Crivelli,
standing livid and waxen on the knee of a splendidly dressed Madonna.

The poor baby on whom such hopes and ambitions hung stared at us with a
solemn unamused gaze. Would all his pretty mothers, his eyes seemed to
ask, succeed in bringing him to maturity in spite of the parched
summers of the south and the stifling existence of the harem? It was
evident that no precaution had been neglected to protect him from
maleficent influences and the danger that walks by night, for his frail
neck and wrists were hung with innumerable charms: Koranic verses,
Soudanese incantations, and images of forgotten idols in amber and coral
and horn and ambergris. Perhaps they will ward off the powers of evil,
and let him grow up to shoulder the burden of the great Caids of the
south.

VI

GENERAL LYAUTEY'S WORK IN MOROCCO

I

It is not too much to say that General Lyautey has twice saved Morocco
from destruction: once in 1912, when the inertia and double-dealing of
Abd-el-Hafid abandoned the country to the rebellious tribes who had
attacked him in Fez, and the second time in August, 1914, when Germany
declared war on France.

In 1912, in consequence of the threatening attitude of the dissident
tribes and the generally disturbed condition of the country, the Su