journey
afoot and penniless by short stages.

In this enterprise the camel did not cast him off. The strange animal
had taken an unaccountable fancy for his master, and on seeing him leave
Orleansville, he set to striding steadfastly behind him, regulating his
pace by this, and never quitting him by a yard.

At the first outset Tartarin found this touching; such fidelity and
devotion above proof went to his heart, all the more because the
creature was accommodating, and fed himself on nothing. Nevertheless,
after a few days, the Tarasconian was worried by having this glum
companion perpetually at his heels, to remind him of his misadventures.
Ire arising, he hated him for his sad aspect, hump and gait of a goose
in harness. To tell the whole truth, he held him as his Old Man of the
Sea, and only pondered on how to shake him off; but the follower would
not be shaken off. Tartarin attempted to lose him, but the camel always
found him; he tried to outrun him, but the camel ran faster. He bade
him begone, and hurled stones at him. The camel stopped with a
mournful mien, but in a minute resumed the pursuit, and always ended by
overtaking him. Tartarin had to resign himself.

For all that, when, after eight full days of tramping, the dusty and
harassed Tarasconian espied the first white housetops of Algiers glimmer
from afar in the verdure, and when he got to the city gates on the noisy
Mustapha Avenue, amid the Zouaves, Biskris, and Mahonnais, all swarming
around him and staring at him trudging by with his camel, overtasked
patience escaped him.

"No! no!" he growled, "it is not likely! I cannot enter Algiers with
such an animal!"

Profiting by a jam of vehicles, he turned off into the fields and jumped
into a ditch. In a minute or so he saw over his head on the highway
the camel flying off with long strides and stretching his neck with a
wistful air.

Relieved of a great weight thereby, the hero sneaked out of his covert,
and entered the town anew by a circuitous path which skirted the wall of
his own little garden.

VII. Catastrophes upon Catastrophes.

ENTIRELY astonished was Tartarin before his Moorish dwelling when he
stopped.

Day was dying and the street deserted. Through the low pointed-arch
doorway which the negress had forgotten to close, laughter was heard;
and the clink of wine-glasses, the popping of champagne corks; and,
floating over all the jolly uproar, a feminine voice singing clearly and