her--dozens of busy little shops on
each side, lined with yellow matting, and hung from top to floor with
rows of lemon-yellow slippers for the men, rose-red slippers for women,
embroidered slippers for the wealthy, crimson slippers for slaves,
slippers with heel-pieces and slippers without. In each shop a man and
boys at work: the white turbans and dark faces bending over the leather,
the coloured jellabs which they wear, the busy hard-white-wood mallets in
the deft brown hands, even the waxed thread, the red jelly which glues
the soles together, the gimlets, the sharp scissors, have a passing
fascination for the wandering Moor himself, who sits down lazily in front
and talks to the workers. Still more for ourselves. Leather bags are
being sewn next door and ornamented with work in coloured leather and
silks. Within hearing of the "tap-tap" lies the skin-yard, and the skins
are scraped and tanned and dyed and turned into slippers all in the same
square acre or two, whence they depart many of them for Egypt and supply
the Cairo bazaars.

A few steps farther, and there is a steady clanking of hammers on anvils,
beating out hot iron--the _Blacksmiths' Quarter_. Not the old turbaned
blacksmiths nor boys with shaved heads, in tunics grimed with age, and
leather aprons sewn with red leather, nor the primitive bellows and
quaint iron points, all being beaten out for the ploughs, are the
features of the Blacksmiths' Quarter; but the sheep. Every forge has its
sheep, every shop its pen like a rabbit-hutch, made out of the side of a
box, where the sheep lives when it is not lying just at the threshold of
the shop in the sun, beside a half-finished meal of bran in a box. Sheep
after sheep, tame and fat, take up half the room in the street: there are
sometimes a few hens, often a tortoiseshell cat curled up on a sack, but
to every shop there is always a sheep fattening, as no other animal in
Morocco fattens, against the _Aid-el-Kebeer_ (the Great Feast), when
every family kills and eats its own mutton.

The little shops in Tetuan group themselves together more or less. There
is another quarter where sieves are made, a corner where baskets and the
countrywomen's huge straw hats are plaited, another where carpenters
congregate, and an open square where rugs, carpets, and curios cram the
shops, and so on.

We left the warm heat from the glowing cinders and the cascade of sparks,
and walked on into the _feddan_ (market-place), which