by countrywomen in yellowish-white haiks, vast straw hats,
and the inevitable veil. Two men passed us with an immense open box
containing thousands of eggs, hung between them by a pole on the shoulder
of each--export for England: forty-eight millions were sent off in 1902,
and this morning's omelette might not be our first Morocco egg. A Moor of
some means came by, riding at a hard-held ambling walk his star-gazing
white mule: the high-peaked saddle and bridle were of scarlet cloth, the
stirrup-leathers of scarlet twisted wool; he wore a creamy woollen haik,
falling in soft folds down to his yellow slippers, a turban whose snowy
disc of enormous size framed his cinnamon-coloured face in symmetrical
folds of spotless white, and the top of a scarlet fez showed in the
centre of it.

Almost opposite us a beggar had sat himself down at the edge of the road,
under the shelter of the high cane fence--a grimy old greybeard, tanned
and worn like a walnut, in a tattered jellab and shady turban. "For the
love of God; for the love of God," he rolled out incessantly in Arabic,
ending in a throaty gobble like a turkey; and the country people threw
him, as they passed, of their bundles--here an orange, there a lump of
charcoal--whatever it might be it was crammed into the hood of the
jellab; and the sing-song and the gobble began again. In a Mohammedan
country it is counted a duty as well as a holy deed to encourage beggars:
almsgiving represents to the faithful Mussulman equivalent gain in
Paradise; and no one starves in Morocco, though occasionally dismissed
with a wave of the hand and "God provide for you." Mad people are
regarded as saints, and credited with the gift of prophecy. It is an
exceedingly holy thing to walk about naked. A holy man in Fez was in the
habit of sitting at a missionary's gate stark naked; eventually this
proceeding had to be put a stop to, because the holy man would insist
upon holding the horses of the missionary's afternoon callers.

Our beggar sat in the same spot day after day, hour after hour,
fatuitously happy, blissfully content. "God is great, and what is written
is written": remorse, regrets, are alike unknown to Mussulmen; and it is
this which dignifies their religion and themselves. Life passes lightly
over them, and chisels few lines and puckers in the serene patriarchal
faces--they may be scamps of the first water, for all one can tell; it
sits lightly upon them.

A small boy in a white tunic