of "his servants."
This thing was entertaining until he grew presumptuous. If you are
polite to some people they are familiar, and want to take an ell for
every inch you have conceded. And then you have to tell them to keep
their place. But Martin, with the instincts of his race, saw in time
when it was coming to that. What a misery it must be for a coloured
gentleman of ambition that the tell-tale _odor stirpis_ cannot be
eliminated! Martin spent extraordinary amounts of money on the purchase
of essences, but to no effect; he could not escape from himself; the
scent of the nigger, _che puzzo!_ would hang round him still. He was a
great coward with all his magniloquence, and when cholera attacked
Tangier, left it in craven terror, and sequestered himself in a country
house a few miles off.

The two captains and I "did" Tangier conscientiously, with the zest of
Bismarck over a yellow-covered novel, and the thoroughness of a Cook's
tourist on his first invasion of Paris. We crawled into a stifling crib
of a dark coffee-house, and sucked thick brown sediment out of
liliputian cups; we smoked hemp from small-bowled pipes until we fell
off into a state of visionary stupor known as "kiff;" we paid our
respects to the Kadi, exchanged our boots for slippers, and settled down
cross-legged on mats as if we were the three tailors of Tooley Street;
we almost consented to have ourselves bled by a Moorish barber--Mahomet
Lamarty's particular, who lanced him in the nape of the neck every
spring--for the Moorish barber still practises the art of Sangrado, and
also extracts teeth. But in my note-taking I was sorely handicapped by
my ignorance of the language. Arabic is spoken in the stretch extending
from Tetuan to Mogador by the coast, and for some distance in the
interior; Chleuh is the dialect of the inhabitants of the Atlas range,
and Guinea of the negroes. Spanish is slightly understood in Tangier and
its vicinity, and is well understood by the Jews. The houses are
generally built of chalk and flint (_tabia_) on the ground-floor, and of
bricks on the upper story. Moorish bricks are good, but rough and
crooked in make. The houses inhabited by Jews are obliged to be coated
with a yellow wash, those of natives are white, those of Christians may
be of any colour. The Jews are made to feel that they are a despised
stock, and yet with Jewish subtlety and perseverance they have managed
to get and keep the trade of the place in their hands