e was. "Tar, tar, rar, tar! tar,
rar, tar!"

"What on earth's that?" wondered Tartarin, suddenly aroused.

It was the bugles of the Chasseurs d'Afrique sounding the turn-out in
the Mustapha barracks. The stupefied lion-slayer rubbed his eyes, for
he had believed himself out in the boundless wilderness; and do you know
where he really was?--in a field of artichokes, between a cabbage-garden
and a patch of beets. His Sahara grew kitchen vegetables.

Close to him, on the pretty verdant slope of Upper Mustapha, the snowy
villas glowed in the rosy rising sun: anybody would believe himself in
the neighbourhood of Marseilles, amongst its bastides and bastidons.

The commonplace and kitchen-gardenish aspect of this sleep-steeped
country much astonished the poor man, and put him in bad humour.

"These folk are crazy," he reasoned, "to plant artichokes in the
prowling-ground of lions; for, in short, I have not been dreaming. Lions
have come here, and there's the proof."

What he called the proof was blood-spots left behind the beast in its
flight. Bending over this ruddy trail with his eye on the lookout and
his revolver in his fist, the valiant Tarasconian went from artichoke to
artichoke up to a little field of oats. In the trampled grass was a pool
of blood, and in the midst of the pool, lying on its flank, with a large
wound in the head, was a--guess what?

"A lion, of course!"

Not a bit of it! An ass!--one of those little donkeys so common in
Algeria, where they are called bourriquots.

VI. Arrival of the Female--A Terrible Combat--"Game Fellows Meet Here!"

LOOKING on his hapless victim, Tartarin's first impulse was one of
vexation. There is such a wide gap between a lion and poor Jack! His
second feeling was one of pity. The poor bourriquot was so pretty and
looked so kindly. The hide on his still warm sides heaved and fell like
waves. Tartarin knelt down, and strove with the end of his Algerian sash
to stanch the blood; and all you can imagine in the way of touchingness
was offered by the picture of this great man tending this little ass.

At the touch of the silky cloth the donkey, who had not twopennyworth of
life in him, opened his large grey eye and winked his long ears two or
three times, as much as to say, "Oh, thank you!" before a final spasm
shook it from head to tail, whereafter it stirred no more.

"Noiraud! Blackey!" suddenly screamed a voice, choking with anguish, as
the branches in a thick