mean--in order to set under your eyes, at the head of this second
episode, the various positions taken by Tartarin's red cap in the
three days' passage it made on board of the Zouave, between France and
Algeria.

First would I show you it at the steaming out, upon deck, arrogant and
heroic as it was, forming a glory round that handsome Tarasconian head.
Next would I show you it at the harbour-mouth, when the bark began
to caper upon the waves; I would depict it for you all of a quake in
astonishment, and as though already experiencing the preliminary qualms
of sea-sickness. Then, in the Gulf of the Lion, proportionably to the
nearing the open sea, where the white caps heaved harder, I would make
you behold it wrestling with the tempest, and standing on end upon the
hero's cranium, with its mighty mane of blue wool bristling out in the
spray and breeze. Position Fourth: at six in the afternoon, with the
Corsican coast in view; the unfortunate chechia hangs over the ship's
side, and lamentably stares down as though to plumb the depths of
ocean. Finally and lastly, the Fifth Position: at the back of a narrow
state-room, in a box-bed so small it seemed one drawer in a nest of
them, something shapeless rolled on the pillow with moans of desolation.
This was the fez--the fez so defiant at the sailing, now reduced to the
vulgar condition of a nightcap, and pulled down over the very ears of
the head of a pallid and convulsed sufferer.

How the people of Tarascon would have kicked themselves for having
constrained the great Tartarin to leave home, if they had but seen him
stretched in the bunk in the dull, wan gleam through the dead-light,
amid the sickly odour of cooking and wet wood--the heart-heaving perfume
of mail-boats; if they had but heard him gurgle at every turn of the
screw, wail for tea every five minutes, and swear at the steward in a
childish treble!

On my word of honour as a story-teller, the poor Turk would have made
a paste-board dummy pity him. Suddenly, overcome by the nausea, the
hapless victim had not even the power to undo the Algerian girdle-cloth,
or lay aside his armoury; the lumpy-handled hunting-sword pounded his
ribs, and the leather revolver-case made his thigh raw. To finish him
arose the taunts of Sancho-Tartarin, who never ceased to groan and
inveigh:

"Well, for the biggest kind of imbecile, you are the finest specimen! I
told you truly how it would be. Ha, ha! you were bound to go to Africa