prodigious collection of all kinds of goods: silks,
minerals, wood in stacks, lead in pigs, cloths, sugars, caruba wood
logs, colza seed, liquorice sticks, sugar-canes. The East and the West
cheek by jowl, even to pyramids of Dutch cheeses which the Genoese were
dyeing red by contact with their hands.

Yonder was the corn market: porters discharging sacks down the shoots
of lofty elevators upon the pier, and loose grain rolling as a golden
torrent through a blonde dust. Men in red skullcaps were sifting it as
they caught it in large asses'-skin sieves, and loading it upon carts
which took their millward way, followed by a regiment of women and
youngsters with wisps and gleaning baskets. Farther on, the dry docks,
where large vessels were laid low on their sides till their yards dipped
in the water; they were singed with thorn-bushes to free them of sea
weed; there rose an odour of pitch, and the deafening clatter of the
sheathers coppering the bottoms with broad sheets of yellow metal.

At whiles a gap in between the masts, in which Tartarin could see the
haven mouth, where the vessels came and went: a British frigate off for
Malta, dainty and thoroughly washed down, with the officer in primrose
gloves, or a large home-port brig hauling out in the midst of uproar and
oaths, whilst the fat captain, in a high silk hat and frockcoat, ordered
the operations in Provencal dialect. Other craft were making forth under
all sail, and, still farther out, more were slowly looming up in the
sunshine as if they were sailing in the air.

All the time a frightful riot, the rumbling of carts, the "Haul all,
haul away!" of the shipmen, oaths, songs, steamboat whistles, the bugles
and drums in Forts Saint Jean and Saint Nicolas, the bells of the Major,
the Accoules, and Saint Victor; with the mistral atop of all, catching
up the noises and clamour, and rolling them up together with a furious
shaking, till confounded with its own voice, which intoned a mad, wild,
heroic melody like a grand charging tune--one that filled hearers with a
longing to be off, and the farther the better--a craving for wings.

It was to the sound of this splendid blast that the intrepid Tartarin
Tarasco of Tarascon embarked for the land of lions.

EPISODE THE SECOND, AMONG "THE TURKS"

I. The Passage--The Five Positions of the Fez--The Third Evening
Out--Mercy upon us!

JOYFUL would I be, my dear readers, if I were a painter--a great artist,
I