thunder"
dies away, and we watch a gigantic smoke-ring, sprung from the mouth of
the gun, float lazily out to the south; while the mueddzin's cry from the
top of the mosque rises and falls on the waves of sound, drifting now
clear, now faint, over the garden.

When the sun dropped, the frogs began, from the cracks in the moist clay
soil where they sat, all over our acre and a half, croaking in a wet,
guttural chorus--the whole garden called; and the rattle of the
tree-beetle which followed was one of those tropical sounds which recall
the East. The frogs were tiny brown fellows, hard to get at. The owls
would begin after the frogs--a brown owl, which flew noiselessly in the
twilight among the fruit-trees and on to the edge of the roof, hooting
long and low or chuckling oddly. Then stillness, and wonderful starlight
nights, all through January. That month no rain fell. In February we had
seven and a quarter inches, and more in March.

Having found Jinan Dolero, and furnished it after a fashion, we still
lacked servants, and they seemed to be almost as difficult to meet with
as houses--that is, trustworthy ones. Again, however, we were fortunate.
A soldier-servant who had lived with a missionary happened to have
nothing to do, and agreed to come to us with his young wife, Tahara. They
both of them knew something of European ways, and were scrupulously
honest. They brought a few oddments, a little looking-glass, a mattress
on which they slept upon the floor of the room near the kitchen, and a
few cooking-pots and pans of their own. We overcame their objection to
sleeping outside the city at that time of year; but I believe they never
liked it up to the last, though they comforted themselves with two guns
(one of which belonged to the man, and one he borrowed) and the fact of a
revolver as well, being all under the same roof with them.

[Illustration: OUR SERVANTS, S`LAM AND TAHARA.

[_To face p. 164._]

They were both of them Riffis, and their own home was in the Riff
country, two days' journey into the mountains from Tetuan. His name was
S`lam Ben Haddon Riffi of Bekiona, son of Haddon and of Fettouch Ben
Haddon of Bekiona. S`lam's wife was Tahara. He had served for a year in
the French army in Algeria, in the 2nd Regiment of Tirailleurs
Algeriens; and having picked up a little French, we learnt, with a few
Arabic words, to understand each other. He and Tahara spoke Shillah to
each other.

S`lam was about twenty-si