ld draw _floos_ from poor
youngsters whose total wealth would probably have failed to yield
threepence to the strictest investigator. Happily for them the charmer was
an artist in his way; he loved his work for its own sake, and abated no
part of his performance, although the reward would hardly buy him and his
assistant a meal of mutton and bread at their labour's end. The boys of
Hanchen were doing brisk business in the brass cases of cartridges that
had been fired on the previous day, and without a doubt the story of the
wonders of a repeating gun lost nothing in the telling.

[Illustration: THE SNAKE-CHARMER]

There was no interval for rest when the hours of greatest heat came round.
Late arrivals who travelled in on mule- or donkey-back renewed business
when it slackened, and brought fresh goods to be sold or exchanged. The
"Sons of Lions" had broken up the market at Sidi el Muktar on the previous
Friday before it was properly concluded, and many natives, disappointed
there, had come out to Hanchen to do their business, until there seemed to
be nothing in any stall that lacked buyers. Even the old man who had a
heap of scrap-iron when the market opened had sold every piece of it by
four o'clock, though it would have puzzled a European to find any use for
such rubbish. The itinerant mender of slippers was hard at work with three
young lads, and I never saw any one of the party idle. Hawks and corbies
fluttered over the butcher's ground, and I noticed a vulture in the deep
vault of the sky. Pariah dogs would clear every bit of refuse from the
ground before another day dawned, and in their nasty fashion would serve
their country, for the weather was very hot and the odours were
overpowering. Flies covered all unprotected meat until it ceased to look
red, and the stall of the seller of sweetmeats was a study in black and
white: black when the swarms settled, and white for a brief moment when he
switched them off with his feathery bamboo brush. Yet, in spite of the
many difficulties under which trade was carried on, one could not help
feeling that buyers and sellers alike were enjoying themselves hugely. The
market did more than help them to make a living. It was at once their
club, their newspaper, and their theatre, and supplied the one recreation
of lives that--perhaps only to European seeming--were tedious as a
twice-told tale.

Here the village folk were able to keep themselves posted in the country's
contemporar