es a good tutorship for a
year or so after leaving the University, and then becomes a schoolmaster
or a clergyman. Marnier, by the way, intended to take orders.

"Now, this sort of young man is not precisely my sort, and especially
not my sort in the Sahara Desert. But I did not want to be rude to
Marnier, who was friendly and agreeable, and obviously anxious to
increase his already considerable store of knowledge. So I put my
inclinations in my pocket, and, with inward reluctance, I agreed.

"We set off with Safti, my faithful one-eyed Arab guide, and after three
long days of riding and talking--as I had feared--Maeterlink and
Tolstoy, Henley and Verlaine (this last being utterly condemned by
Marnier as a man of weak character and degraded life) we saw the towers
of Beni-Kouidar aspiring above the shifting sands, the tufted summits of
the thousands of palm-trees, and heard the dull beating of drums and the
cries of people borne to us over the spaces of which silence is the
steady guardian.

"We were all pretty tired, but Marnier was, especially done up. He had
recently been working very hard for the 'first' with which he had left
Oxford, and was not in good condition. We were, therefore, glad enough
when we rode through the wide street thronged with natives, turned the
corner into the great camel market, and finally dismounted before
the door of the one inn, the 'Rendezvous des Amis,' a mean, dusty,
one-storey building, on whose dirty white wall was a crude painting of a
preposterous harridan in a purple empire gown, pouring wine for a Zouave
who was evidently afflicted with elephantiasis. Yet, tired as I was,
I stepped out into the camel market for a moment before going into the
house, emptied my lungs, and slowly filled them.

"'What air!' I said to Marnier, who had followed me.

"'It is extraordinary,' he answered in his rather dry tenor voice.
'I should say like the best champagne, if I did not happen to be a
teetotaller.'

"(The market, I must explain, was not at that moment in active
operation.)

"After a _bain de siege_--we both longed for total immersion--and some
weak tea, in which I mingled a spoonful of rum, we felt better, but
we reposed till dinner, and once again Marnier, in his habitually
restrained and critical manner, discussed contemporary literature, and
what Plato and Aristotle, judging by; their writings, would have been
likely to think of it. And once again I felt as if I were in the 'High