puffing and melting in trying to get out of
his big boots in order to enter the temples.

Betimes at nightfall, when he was returning heart-broken at not having
discovered anything at either bagnio or mosque, our man from Tarascon,
in passing mansions, would hear monotonous songs, smothered twanging
of guitars, thumping of tambourines, and feminine laughter-peals, which
would make his heart beat.

"Haply she is there!" he would say to himself.

Thereupon, granting the street was unpeopled, he would go up to one of
these dwellings, lift the heavy knocker of the low postern, and timidly
rap. The songs and merriment would instantly cease. There would be
audible behind the wall nothing excepting low, dull flutterings as in a
slumbering aviary.

"Let's stick to it, old boy," our hero would think. "Something will
befall us yet."

What most often befell him was the contents of the cold-water jug on
the head, or else peel of oranges and Barbary figs; never anything more
serious.

Well might the lions of the Atlas Mountains doze in peace.

IX. Prince Gregory of Montenegro.

IT was two long weeks that the unfortunate Tartarin had been seeking his
Algerian flame, and most likely he would have been seeking after her to
this day if the little god kind to lovers had not come to his help under
the shape of a Montenegrin nobleman.

It happened as follows.

Every Saturday night in winter there is a masked ball at the Grand
Theatre of Algiers, just as at the Paris Opera-House. It is the undying
and ever-tasteless county fancy dress ball--very few people on the
floor, several castaways from the Parisian students' ballrooms or
midnight dance-houses, Joans of Arc following the army, faded characters
out of the Java costume-book of 1840, and half-a-dozen laundress's
underlings who are aiming to make loftier conquests, but still preserve
a faint perfume of their former life--garlic and saffron sauce. The real
spectacle is not there, but in the green-room, transformed for the nonce
into a hall of green cloth or gaming saloon.

An enfevered and motley mob hustle one another around the long green
table-covers: Turcos out for the day and staking their double halfpence,
Moorish traders from the native town, Negroes, Maltese, colonists from
the inland, who have come forty leagues in order to risk on a turning
card the price of a plough or of a yoke of oxen; all a-quivering, pale,
clenching their teeth, and with that singular, w