r a mid-day rest, and entered the village in search of milk and
eggs. All the men save one were at work on the land, and he, the
guardian of the village, an old fellow and feeble, stood on a sandy
mound within the zariba. He carried a very antiquated flint-lock, that may
have been own brother to Kaid M'Barak's trusted weapon. I am sure he could
not have had the strength to fire, even had he enjoyed the knowledge and
possessed the material to load it. It was his business to mount guard over
the village treasure. The mound he stood upon was at once the mat'mora
that hid the corn store, and the bank that sheltered the silver dollars
for whose protection every man of the village would have risked his life
cheerfully. The veteran took no notice of our arrival: had we been thieves
he could have offered no resistance. He remained silent and stationary,
unconscious that the years in which he might have fulfilled his trust had
gone for ever. All along the way the boundaries of arable land were marked
by little piles of stones and I looked anxiously for some sign of the
curious festival that greets the coming of the new corn, a ceremony in
which a figure is made for worship by day and sacrifice by night; we were
just too late for it. For the origin of this sacrifice the inquirer must
go back to the time of nature worship. It was an old practice, of course,
in the heyday of Grecian civilisation, and might have been seen in
England, I believe, little more than twenty years ago.

Claims for protection are made very frequently upon the road. There are
few of the dramatic moments in which a man rushes up, seizes your stirrup
and puts himself "beneath the hem of your garment," but there are
numerous claims for protection of another sort. In Morocco all the Powers
that signed the Treaty of Madrid are empowered to grant the privilege.
France has protected subjects by the thousand. They pay no taxes, they are
not to be punished by the native authorities until their Vice-Consul has
been cited to appear in their defence, and, in short, they are put above
the law of their own country and enabled to amass considerable wealth. The
fact that the foreigner who protects them is often a knave and a thief is
a draw-back, but the popularity of protection is immense, for the
protector may possibly not combine cunning with his greed, while the
native Basha or his khalifa quite invariably does. British subjects may
not give protection,--happily the Briti