hich the Moors
have left all over Spain--the garden-house of the French Consul. In
another four months, when all aristocratic Tetuan would migrate in a body
into their "summer-houses," and by their mutual presence reassure each
other as to their safety, the Consul would move out of the city: at
present he would look on such a step as sheer madness.

An old negro slave, with a beard like cotton-wool, was at work in the
garden, and, opening the door, let us in to look round. A wide gravel
path led up to the dazzling walls of the house, spotless as a sheet of
glazed cream-laid note-paper, the window-frames and door picked out with
Reckitt's blue. A white railing in front edged the terrace, the steps of
which were tanned by the damp salt air a fine rusty ochre. The house
inside was built on the invariable Moorish lines--kitchen and inferior
rooms on the ground floor, one great lofty room above, and the flat roof
over all. A garden-room flanked the house on the south-east, the front
open to the garden, pillared and arched with the old white plastered
"horse-shoe." In underneath the arches were shade and cool tiling, and
outside more tiled ground suggested steaming brews of fragrant green tea,
tiny glasses, low tables, and long divans spread under the sky.

It was a grey day, and height beyond height on into the Riff country was
cloud-capped, while _shar d'jebel_ (the hair of the mountain, as the
Moors call snow) whitened a few furrowed peaks. The flats lay below to
the left, and a horizontal blue pencil line was scored beyond them.
Cow-birds stalked about the garden among some new vines which the old
negro was putting in.

We sat down on the terrace, looking at the view, and the silence of the
place was above all things most striking. A cavalcade of mules tailed
away in the distance in single file along the faint track to the sea; the
packed white city lay to the right, but no voices reached us; here
cart-wheels, railway-trains, threshing-machines, and busy farm life were
not. It would have been hard to age and wrinkle in such a spot--Adam and
Eve might have felt at home.

It was also a weedy one, this Paradise: a tangle of greenery spread
underneath the oranges, hanging like yellow trimming on a green fabric,
choking the vines and a few scarlet geraniums. Labour, in such indolent
and self-possessed acres, was a crude and gauche idea.

The greybeard with the marmoset face and leathern apron let us out at the
red door: h