e municipality? What a dreadful state of uncertainty! It is
true some Negro traders, come to Beaucaire Fair, assert having met in
the middle of the deserts a European whose description agreed with his;
he was proceeding towards Timbuctoo. May Heaven preserve our Tartarin!"

When he read this, the son of Tarascon reddened, blanched, and
shuddered. All Tarascon appeared unto him: the club, the cap-poppers,
Costecalde's green arm-chair, and, hovering over all like a spread
eagle, the imposing moustaches of brave Commandant Bravida.

At seeing himself here, as he was, cowardly lolling on a mat, whilst his
friends believed him slaughtering wild beasts, Tartarin of Tarascon was
ashamed of himself, and could have wept had he not been a hero.

Suddenly he leaped up and thundered:

"The lion, the lion! Down with him!"

And dashing into the dusty lumber-hole where mouldered the shelter-tent,
the medicine-chest, the potted meats, and the gun-cases, he dragged them
out into the middle of the court.

Sancho-Tartarin was no more: Quixote-Tartarin occupied the field of
active life.

Only the time to inspect his armament and stores, don his harness, get
into his heavy boots, scribble a couple of words to confide Baya to
the prince, and slip a few bank-notes sprinkled with tears into
the envelope, and then the dauntless Tarasconian rolled away in the
stage-coach on the Blidah road, leaving the house to the negress,
stupor-stricken before the pipe, the turban, and babooshes--all the
Moslem shell of Sidi Tart'ri which sprawled piteously under the little
white trefoils of the gallery.

EPISODE THE THIRD, AMONG THE LIONS

I. What becomes of the Old Stage-coaches.

COME to look closely at the vehicle, it was an old stage-coach all
of the olden time, upholstered in faded deep blue cloth, with those
enormous rough woollen balls which, after a few hours' journey, finally
establish a raw spot in the small of your back.

Tartarin of Tarascon had a corner of the inside, where he installed
himself most free-and-easily: and, preliminarily to inspiring the rank
emanations of the great African felines, the hero had to content himself
with that homely old odour of the stage-coach, oddly composed of a
thousand smells, of man and woman, horses and harness, eatables and
mildewed straw.

There was a little of everything inside--a Trappist monk, some Jew
merchants, two fast ladies going to join their regiment, the Third
Hussars, a