Christ, the one that deliberately tramples under foot the Son of God.

It is dry also because in the religion itself there is something
searing, blighting, as with a subtle breath of hell. This is true of the
lands where it has laid hold, and true of the hearts,--it is dry.

Dry soil, NOT dead soil. If you were out here in Algiers and could see
and know the people, you would say so too. The next best thing is to
bring you some of their faces to look at that you may judge whether the
possibilities have gone out of them yet or not: women faces and girl
faces, for it is of these that I write. Will you spend five minutes of
your hours to-day in looking--just looking--at them, till they have sunk
down into your heart? ARE they the faces of a dead people? Do you see no
material for Christ if they had a chance of the Water of Life? These are
real living women, living to-day, unmet by Him.

[Illustration: TYPES IN TUNIS AND ALGIERS]

To begin with, the first glance will show their intelligence. Get an
average ignorant Englishwoman of the peasant class to repeat a Bible
story that she has never heard before. She will dully remember one or
two salient facts. Go up to a mountain village here and get a group of
women and talk to them, and choose one of them to repeat to the others
what you have said. You will feel after a sentence or two that your
Arabic was only English put into Arabic words; hers is sparkling with
racy idiom. More than that, she is making the story _live_ before her
hearers: a touch of local color here--a quaint addition there. It is all
aglow. And this a woman who has sat year after year in her one garment
of red woollen drapery, cooking meals and nursing children, with nothing
to stimulate any thoughts beyond the day's need.

And their powers of feeling: do their faces look as if these have been
crushed out by a life of servitude? Not a bit of it. No European who has
not lived among them can have any idea of their intensity: love, hate,
grief, reign by turns. Anger and grief can take such possession of them
as to bring real illness of a strange and undiagnosable kind. We have
known such cases to last for months; not unfrequently they end fatally;
and more than one whom we have met has gone stone-blind with crying for
a dead husband who probably made things none too easy while he lived.

And then their will power: the faces tell of that too. The women have
far more backbone than their menkind, who have been