before him. They all gazed at his legs in the billowing red trousers;
some like children regarding a Jack-in-the-box which had just sprung
up into view, others like ignorant, but superstitious, people who
had unexpectedly come upon a shrine by the wayside. One or two seemed
disposed to laugh nervously, as the very stupid laugh at anything
they see for the first time. But fear seized them. They refrained
convulsively and shambled on to the gangway, looking sideways, like
fowls, and holding their rugs awkwardly to their breasts with their
dirty, red hands.

To Domini there was something pitiful in the sight of all these lads,
uprooted from their homes in France, stumbling helplessly on board this
ship that was to convey them to Africa. They crowded together. Their
poor bundles and bags jostled one against the other. With their clumsy
boots they trod on each other's feet. And yet all were lonely strangers.
No two in the mob seemed to be acquaintances. And every lad, each in
his different way, was furtively on the defensive, uneasily wondering
whether some misfortune might not presently come to him from one of
these unknown neighbours.

A few of the recruits, as they came on board, looked up at Domini as she
leant over the rail; and in all the different coloured and shaped eyes
she thought she read a similar dread and nervous hope that things might
turn out pretty well for them in the new existence that had to be faced.
The Zouave, wholly careless or unconscious of the fact that he was
an incarnation of Africa to these raw peasants, who had never before
stirred beyond the provinces where they were born, went on taking
the tickets, and tossing the woollen rugs to the passing figures, and
pointing ferociously to the gangway. He got very tired of his task
towards the end, and showed his fatigue to the latest comers, shoving
their rugs into their arms with brusque violence. And when at length the
wharf was bare he spat on it, rubbed his short-fingered, sunburnt hands
down the sides of his blue jacket, and swaggered on board with the air
of a dutiful but injured man who longed to do harm in the world. By this
time the ship was about to cast off, and the recruits, ranged in line
along the bulwarks of the lower deck, were looking in silence towards
Marseilles, which, with its tangle of tall houses, its forest of masts,
its long, ugly factories and workshops, now represented to them the
whole of France. The bronchial hoot of the