part of the actual creed of
Mohammedans, Arabs, and Berbers alike. But Moors have a hundred
superstitions. They believe that all animals had a language once upon a
time,--that the horse prays to Allah when he stretches out his leg; that
the donkey which falls down, asks Allah that the same may happen to his
master. They say that the donkey was once a man whom Allah changed into
his present shape because he washed himself with milk; that the stork was
a _kadi_, or judge, who was made a stork because he passed unjust
sentences upon his fellow-men. It is therefore a sin to kill a stork, or
a crow, or a toad, or a white spider, or a white chicken. A white spider
once spun its web over a cave where Mohammed hid: his enemies saw it,
thought therefore that no one could have recently entered the cave, and
passed on.

It is hardly necessary to say, that about Death--the Great Secret--there
are numerous superstitions. There were too many funerals in Tetuan: early
in the afternoon one was often encountered at the Gate of the Tombs;
death would only have taken place that morning, without much inquiry as
to its cause, and whether by fair means or foul nobody knew and few
cared. The procession came swinging along, stately men in flowing
garments, white and dark, chanting the weird funeral hymn or
"lament"--always the same mournful, monotonous cadence, rising and
falling in the narrow streets, and at last out into the air. And then
once through the Bab-el-M`kabar, the great company in white turn into the
Moorish burial-ground, and arrange themselves in a long line against the
hillside, and the chant becomes general, almost a great cry, full of the
strange fascination of certain Eastern music, withal so unintelligible to
Europeans.

The body, loosely wrapped in white, lies on an open bier. After a sort of
service on that rough hillside against the walls of the city, the
procession winds on again to the shallow grave: a last chant, and the
body goes into the earth, and is quickly covered. A scribe, or reader, is
left behind when every one has gone: he reads pieces out of the Kor[=a]n
over the grave, and chants. Friends, mourners perhaps, will come out on
other days, and sit round the tomb, reading the Kor[=a]n together, and
singing the weird, sad melodies. You may see them. But I have never seen
a Moor give way to the slightest outward expression of grief.

Mohammedans firmly believe, of course, in a Paradise to which the good
are a