about half-past five, just as we had settled ourselves down
after tea to read, there was an unusual stir on the stairs. A minute
later and the door burst open. Tahara staggered in, followed by S`lam,
who seemed very much excited and alarmed. The woman was deathly pale; her
eyes were ringed with black. R. and I, seeing she was ill, jumped to the
conclusion that something or other was very wrong with her, and tried to
make her sit down, or lie down, at once, on our divan. In a confused
scene which followed, the only words we grasped were, "Tabiba, tabiba"
(Doctor), and S`lam, at our instigation, rushed downstairs to go off to
Tetuan, and to bring back with him Miss Z----, one of the lady
missionaries. Tahara was almost beside herself, apparently with terror,
and for a few moments one was inclined to doubt her sanity. We tried
vainly to quiet her, almost holding her on the divan; but there was
evidently something on her mind which every moment threw her into fresh
agitations, and--_ah! what would we not have given to have understood
Arabic!_ for Tahara knew no French, like S`lam, and could barely say half
a dozen words in English; her Spanish, of which she knew a few words, was
Greek to us too.

"Signorita! signorita! tabiba!" she kept repeating, wailing, and then a
torrent of Shillah and Arabic and Spanish would follow, and we were at
our wits' end. At last R. managed to quiet her a little, and by-and-by to
make her try to help us to understand, by saying slowly in Arabic two or
three words which would be intelligible to us, together with the word or
so of English which she herself knew. Then we gathered that her one
desire was that I should go to the tabiba's. But why? We told her that
S`lam had gone. She burst out into fresh agonies and shrieks: "S`lam not
go! S`lam not go!" Then she got up, and apparently wished to go
downstairs--the last thing we thought she ought to do; but all our
efforts to keep her still seemed rather futile; and from what she was
trying to make us understand, there was more behind than we had an idea
of. She went, almost ran, down into her and S`lam's bedroom, we following
hard behind. Inside the room she tip-toed up to a recess high in the
wall, almost out of her reach, and with difficulty lifted down a small
bundle of rags. This she unrolled, fold after fold, before our eyes,
while a thousand guesses as to what was coming rushed through the brain;
the last rag came off, and a small blue bottle,