ehouse, workshop, and bazaar; while the men, cross-legged on their
little hard couches, worked away with the zest of those who work for the
few coins that alone will get them the food, the draught of wine, the
hour's mirth and indulgence at the estaminet, to which they look across
the long, stern probation of discipline and maneuver.

Skill, grace, talent, invention whose mother was necessity, and
invention that was the unforced offshoot of natural genius, were all
at work; and the hands that could send the naked steel down at a blow
through turban and through brain could shape, with a woman's ingenuity,
with a craftsman's skill, every quaint device and dainty bijou from
stone and wood, and many-colored feathers, and mountain berries, and
all odds and ends that chance might bring to hand, and that the women of
Bedouin tribes or the tourists of North Africa might hereafter buy with
a wondrous tale appended to them--racy and marvelous as the Sapir slang
and the military imagination could weave--to enhance the toys' value,
and get a few coins more on them for their manufacture.

Ignorance jostled art, and bizarre ran hand in hand with talent, in
all the products of the Chasseurs' extemporized studio; but nowhere
was there ever clumsiness, and everywhere was there an industry,
gay, untiring, accustomed to make the best of the worst; the workers
laughing, chattering, singing, in all good-fellowship, while the fingers
that gave the dead thrust held the carver's chisel, and the eyes that
glared blood-red in the heat of battle twinkled mischievously over the
meerschaum bowl, in whose grinning form some great chief of the Bureau
had just been sculptured in audacious parody.

In the midst sat Rake, tattooing with an eastern skill the skin of a
great lion, that a year before he had killed in single combat in the
heart of Oran, having watched for the beast twelve nights in vain, high
perched on a leafy crest of rock, above a water-course. While he worked
his tongue flew far and fast over the camp slang--the slangs of all
nations came easy to him--in voluble conversation with the Chasseur
next, who was making a fan out of feathers that any Peeress might
have signaled with at the Opera. "Crache-au-nez-d'la-Mort" was in high
popularity with his comrades; and had said but the truth when he averred
that he had never been so happy as under the tricolor. The officers
pronounced him an incurably audacious "pratique"; he was always in
mis